The Sun.
London, England, 1864-09-14 00:00:00

terms of reconciliation, and by the expression of
their own vindictive passions have hampered their
own cause so much that it is equally impossible for
them to restore the Union or to make peace with-
out it. No word was breathed at Chicago of recog-
nition or separation of the States. The Union was
everywhere spoken of, but peace and conciliation
and compromise were upon every one's lips. And
conciliation and compromise must lead to that end
which we are all hoping to see. When once the
sword is sheathed, and the smoke of the battle•
field is allowed to clear away, men will look rcund
and count the cost of the war. They will recog-
nise the utter hopelessness and futility of their
e Ef)rts to subdue a people as brave, as determined,
and far more united ani singlemiaded than them-
selves. They will see, too, the inconsistency, we
might almost say the absurdity, of WasHINGToN's
descendants fighting to enforce the very principles
which he spent his life in opposing. It is the
principle of independence, the recognition of the
rights of States which has made America a nation,
and it is those principles which the North must
acknowledge in the inevitable recognition of
Southern independence, to which the Chicago Con-
vention is the first decided step.

THE CRYSTAL PALACE.

No. IV.

Its Peerless Capacity as a Music Hall.

The Diameter of the Handel Orchestra has
already been spcken of as exactly double the dia.
meter of the Dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. From
that one consideration alone, it will, upon the in-
stant, be recognised that, in the mere scope of the
arrangements permanently made within the edifice
for its various musical performances, the Crystal
Palace, as a melodic arena, regarded simply as a
Musio Hall, stands forth, here also, as it does in so
many other particulars, altogether unrivalled.
The magnitude of the area set apart thus for orches-
tral purposes—upon a scale so gigantic and hitherto
unexampled—is attributable to the gradual after-
expansion of what was originally a very grand
enterprise on the part of the designer. And thedrop-
ping of the pebble, as one may say, from the which—
ring upon ring—there has subsequently expanded,
circle upon circle, tier above tier, this magnificent
choral and instrumental amphitheatre, was—the
carrying out of the project of the First Great Handel
Festival in 18571 Since that occasion, the enter-
prise then happily set on foot has been developed to
its present vast and unrivalled dimensions. The
Orchestra—thenceforth to be known as the Handel
Orchestra—grew and grew until it came at last
to occupy, as it does now, permanently, the
whole of the western portion of the Great
Central Transept. It has contrived at last to
assume such dimensions, there, in fact, that it
can be said of it (not by any means extravagantly
or hyperbolicall) ) that, if need were, it could
contain within it, and that comfortably seated
before their music stands, the six largest orchestras
in the United Kingdom. It could so accommodate
those six largest orchestras, and yet, even then, have
elbow-room ! In point of fact, no farther back
than in 1862, at the Great Handel Festival—then
given with a pomp that a pagan might have
said must for a certainty (shall we say, for a dead
certainty !') have soothed the manes of the giant
composer, nay, that that pagan might almost in
the old heathenish classic times have regarded Ell
Handel's Apotheosis—more than Four Thousand
vocal and instrumental performers were ranged to•
gether, there—immediately below and upon either
hand of the great organ—upon the benches of the
Handel Orchestra.
That superb instrument just mentioned, The
Organ—so to speak, the palpitating heart of the
whole Orchestra—an organ, expressly built for the
Crystal Palace by the Messrs Gray and Davison—
it should here be remarked at once at this first
mention of it assumes high rank among the
noblest specimens yet fabricated in that im-
perial class of instuments. It is worth mak-
ing a journey, indeed, round the upper gallery
immediately at the back of it, to peer in
through an obscure looking door, which there some-
times stands ajar, at the throng of men standing in
a cluster there, working away for the bare life of
them at the bellows which give it breath ! Breath
to those glorious sounds rolling out day after
day, at an appointed hour (according to the
varying announcement in each day's programme),
under the touch of the master-hand of
Mr. James Coward, the Company's Organist.
Glorious sounds rolling forth at that touch
under the every movement of the accomplished
performer's hands from an instrument having an
array of Four Rows of Keys—an organ containing
within it upwards of Seventy Stops, and consider-
ably more than Four Thousand Five Hundred
Pipes ! The Stops of this Mammoth Organ,
in point of fact, number exactly 74—the
Pipes of it no less than 4,598. Hearkening
at times to the enormous volumes of sound
pouring forth from the instrument, sounds
reverberating under the arch of the great
transept, and rolling in re-Echoing peals, to the right
hand and to the left, down the long'perspective of
the Nave, it seems almost incredible that they can
emanate from the momentary touch of that one
isolated performer. Ranging, as they do, from treble
to diapason, varying from trumpets to flageolet,
breathing now with the dulcet tones as of a solitary
hautboy, now as with a very tumult of horns and
ophecleides, it seems more like the performance of
a whole orchestra than that of a single instru-
mentalist.

Reverting, however, to tbo mere mechanics
arrangements of the interior structure here raised
in this western portion of the Great Centre Trim..
sept, it is especially noticeable among these, how it
has come to pass that so signal a triumph has been
there won over a world of acoustic difficulties,
The secret of the success thus achieved may be
recognised, in truth, at aglance—in the wooden
ceiling arched in a single span over the whole
vast area of this unrivalled orchestra. Remem-
bering that, in the clear span of it, this immenee
wooden arch—about the largest timber arch
ever constructed—remembering that this spas
cious arch is in the clear span of it upwards of
One Hundred Feet—that it has a depth of
considerably more than Two Hundred, and that,
besides this, it rises more than thirty feet in
the centre, where it reaches an attitude of upwards
of eighty feet from the floor of the Orchestra—it
must be allowed to have been very exquisitely
adjusted, indeed, in its component parte, e; hen it
comes to be added, after all this, that no lateral
pressure whatever has been thrown from it upon
the edifice of glass and iron within which the whole
of this supplementary framework has, with such
wonderful ingenuity, been contrived. That, in
other words, it is self-sustaining, upon its own
foundations.
Here it is, in effect, under this stupendous sound-
ing-board, that between Foir and Five Thousand
Performers, vocalists and instrumentalists, can
interpret, as nowhere else can be interpreted, na
for that matter, here it is that they have so inter
preted the sublimest imaginiags of the demigods
among our musical composers—a Handel, a
Beethoven, a Mendelesohn.
CryAsstalaPainlaueseic-h a
isnlol
less,in qt
than
si tne
in a n
toht
eh eorn
es ei nn s
we , theeh
we have been here examining it, wholly and entirely
without
birds—it any i
s altogether
tog ecompetitor.tner
unrivalled. A
Loitering
ie
go song
within
the Crystal Palace, of an evening, when the sun is
verging westwards, and when the who!ts glittering
Pane, nave and transepts and wings, kindles under
the horieoutal beams—one may listen there
—among the statuary and the verdure—to
the notes of all the various song birds that make
the Crystal Palace their perpetual haunt, flitting
about, hither and thither, free as air under its
transparent roof, nesting among the boughs of
that indoor garden—melodious singers as varied in
their skill as the thrush, the robin, the blackbird,
and the nightingale.

The Preachership of Archbishop Tenisoles Chapel,
Regent-street, has been conferred on the Rev. C, R. Gor-
den, M.A,