The Sun.
London, England, 1855-08-09 00:00:00

The dance of last 'Whit-Monday night exceeded all
before,
No pretty girl for miles about was missiog from the
floor ;
But Mary kept the belt of love, and 0 but she was gay !
She danced ct jig, she sang a song that took my heart
away.
When she stood up for dancing her steps were so
complete,
The music nearly killed itself to listen to her feet ;
The fiddler moan'd his blindness, he heard her so much
praised,
Rut blessed himself he wasn't deaf when once her
voice she raised.

O lovely Mary Donelly, your beauty's my distress,
It's far too beauteous to be mine, but I'll never wish
it less."

Why, a song like this weighs more in the balance
to our minds and hearts than all the spasmodic
grandiloquence that Professor Aytoun, wicked
wag that ho is, sang with so soporific a lullaby
into Lethe through the mocking echoes of his
" Firmilian." But the jewel of the book before
us—girdled by its filagree setting of the " Day and
Night Songs "—the central gem of all, we have not
yet mentioned—the principal poem of the collec-
tion, " The Music Master." It is " A Love Story "
—a simple, homely tale enough—the theme of a
ballad—a village romance about the loves and the
lives of poor little Milly and young Gerald White,
the music master. The story might be told almost
in two minutes, so few and so plain are the inci-
dents related in it. Yet, in the telling of it, Wil-
liam Allingham has struck the chords of his harp—
our heartstrings—so deftly that the sounds seem to
call the tears up into his voice as he sings, and
into our eyes as we listen—and we lay the tale
that is told aside at last only to revert to it often,
and very tenderly, afterwards, remembering the
song and the singer, as we do the thought of some
dear friend and the token of some cherished friend-
ship. Yet the Love Story of the Music Master is not
without its faults either, when considered with
anything like critical acumen :—Sister Ann we
cannot but deem maligned without apparent reason
of any appreciable kind whatsoever—Gerald's first
departure remains to the last moment altogether
unexplained—Milly's premature death appears even
now when we think of it entirely and bewilderingly
incomprehensible. Nevertheless, enough for every
blemish of the poem when these passing exceptions
to it have been pronounced. Otherwise " The
Music Master"—the poetic gem in its setting of
Day and Night Songs—remains, to our judgment,
" one entire and perfect Chrysolite." How ex-
quisitely, and with what a loving hand, how very
tenderly and delicately, Mr. Allinghani pencils the
form and features of his heroine :

" White lily,—Milly,—darling little girl
I think I see as once I saw her stand ;
Her soft hair waving in a single curl
Behind her ear ; a kid licking her hand ;
Her fair young face with health and racing warm,
And loose frock blown about her slender form.
" The dizzy lark, a dot on the white cloud,
That sprinkles music on the vernal breeze,
Was not more gay than dilly's joyous mood ;
The silent lark that starry twilight sees
Cradled among the braird in closest bower,
Not more quiescent than her quiet hour.
" Her mind was open as a flowery cup
That gathers richness from the sun and dew,
To knowl' dge, and as easily drew up
The wholesome sap of life ; unwatch'd it grew,
A lovely blossom in a shady place ;
And like her mind so was her innocent face."

Such was Milly as she appeared to her lover in the
early morning of her girlhood. Later on we see
her, when . .
" Her silky locks have ripened into brown,
Her soft blue eyes grown deeper and more shy,
And lightly on her lifted head the crown
Of queenly maidenhood sits meek and high ;
Her frank soul lives in her ingenuous voice,
Most purely tuned to sorrow or rejoice."
Of Gerald we hear at the very outset--

" The boy's whole thought to music lean'd and evrity'd ;
He heard a minor in the wind at night,
And many a tune the village noises played ;
The thunder roar'd like bands before the mighe
Of marching armies; in deep summer calm
The falling brooklets would intone a psalm."
And so the great love of his art deepens into a
treble
glides at last
passion with his advancing life--and
between the two, between the youth and the
maiden, at once as a bond and as a revelation. The
gtreal:
earliest apparent reciprocation of their tenderness
comes indeed to them silently, one eveannidn
their
loiter through the village coppice side by side,
" -- The dappled hyacinthine glade
Lit up in plats of. blue how soft
The kine s deep lowing is by distance ni d, ,
The Quail's ' twit-wit-qcit' like alto)) 'a - '
Thrown along ice—the dragon-flies, the
pebble
The rustling twig—all noticed in
ft,, e birds,
w words t"
But Gerald's passionate outpouring
Milly, improvised. upon the keys ng of his love for
steals forth not long after in the of the piano,
the music-master thinks hire darkness, when
the inarticulate confessio self n
streamed into the alone, but when
lighted ears, and through de-
heart of Milly them into the enraptured.
served. It is the clim standing
at the open door unob-
climax of the aX *of the joy of the poem—
thequickly afterward sorrow emerging from it but too
6; Maio Mister" 'to R.
The composition of the
a myrtle-wreath for the brow