The contract was made with Mr. Herter in April, 1860, and the work, having been accepted, was sent to Boston during the last winter, and safely stored in the lecture-room beneath the Music Hall.  In March the Great Work arrived from Germany, and was stored in the hall above.

“The seven-years’ task is done,—­the danger from flood and fire so far escaped,—­the gantlet of the pirates safely run,—­the perils of the sea and the rail surmounted by the good Providence of God.”

The devout gratitude of the President of the Association, under whose auspices this great undertaking has been successfully carried through, will be shared by all lovers of Art and all the friends of American civilization and culture.  We cannot naturalize the Old-World cathedrals, for they were the architectural embodiment of a form of worship belonging to other ages and differently educated races.  But the organ was only lent to human priesthoods for their masses and requiems; it belongs to Art, a religion of which God himself appoints the high-priests.  At first it appears almost a violence to transplant it from those awful sanctuaries, out of whose arches its forms seemed to grow, and whose echoes seemed to hold converse with it, into our gay and gilded halls, to utter its majestic voice before the promiscuous multitude.  Our hasty impression is a wrong one.  We have undertaken, for the first time in the world’s history, to educate a nation.  To teach a people to know the Creator in His glorious manifestations through the wondrous living organs is a task for which no implement of human fabrication is too sacred; for all true culture is a form of worship, and to every rightly ordered mind a setting forth of the Divine glory.

This consummate work of science and skill reaches us in the midst of the discordant sounds of war, the prelude of that blessed harmony which will come whenever the jarring organ of the State has learned once more to obey its keys.

God grant that the Miserere of a people in its anguish may soon be followed by the Te Deum of a redeemed Nation!

* * * * *

THE KING’S WINE.

    The small green grapes in countless clusters grew,
    Feeding on mystic moonlight and white dew
    And mellow sunshine, the long summer through: 

    Till, with blind motion in her veins, the Vine
    Felt the delicious pulses of the wine,
    And the grapes ripened in the year’s decline.

    And day by day the Virgins watched their charge;
    And when, at last, beyond the horizon’s marge
    The harvest-moon dropt beautiful and large,

    The subtile spirit in the grape was caught,
    And to the slowly dying Monarch brought
    In a great cup fantastically wrought,

    Whereof he drank; then straightway from his brain
    Went the weird malady, and once again
    He walked the Palace free of scar or pain,—­