What is this wondrous piece of mechanism which has cost so much time and money, and promises to become one of the chief attractions of Boston and a source of honest pride to all cultivated Americans?  The organ, as its name implies, is the instrument, in distinction from all other and less noble instruments.  We might almost think it was called organ as being a part of an unfinished organism, a kind of Frankenstein-creation, half framed and half vitalized.  It breathes like an animal, but its huge lungs must be filled and emptied by alien force.  It has a wilderness of windpipes, each furnished with its own vocal adjustment, or larynx.  Thousands of long, delicate tendons govern its varied internal movements, themselves obedient to the human muscles which are commanded by the human brain, which again is guided in its volitions by the voice of the great half-living creature.  A strange cross between the form and functions of animated beings, on the one hand, and the passive conditions of inert machinery, on the other!  Its utterance rises through all the gamut of Nature’s multitudinous voices, and has a note for all her outward sounds and inward moods.  Its thunder is deep as that of billows that tumble through ocean-caverns, and its whistle is sharper than that of the wind through their narrowest crevice.  It roars louder than the lion of the desert, and it can draw out a thread of sound as fine as the locust spins at hot noon on his still tree-top.  Its clustering columns are as a forest in which every music-flowering tree and shrub finds its representative.  It imitates all instruments; it cheats the listener with the sound of singing choirs; it strives for a still purer note than can be strained from human throats, and emulates the host of heaven with its unearthly “voice of angels.”  Within its breast all the passions of humanity seem to reign in turn.  It moans with the dull ache of grief, and cries with the sudden thrill of pain; it sighs, it shouts, it laughs, it exults, it wails, it pleads, it trembles, it shudders, it threatens, it storms, it rages, it is soothed, it slumbers.

Such is the organ, man’s nearest approach to the creation of a true organism.

But before the audacious conception of this instrument ever entered the imagination of man, before he had ever drawn a musical sound from pipe or string, the chambers where the royal harmonies of his grandest vocal mechanism were to find worthy reception were shaped in his own marvellous structure.  The organ of hearing was finished by its Divine Builder while yet the morning stars sang together, and the voices of the young creation joined in their first choral symphony.  We have seen how the mechanism of the artificial organ takes on the likeness of life; we shall attempt to describe the living organ in common language by the aid of such images as our ordinary dwellings furnish us.  The unscientific reader need not take notice of the words in parentheses.