Excerpt from The North American Review, Vol. 50 But such influences as these can never create a national music. The climate of England is as well fitted to make musicians as that of Scotland or Germany, and the scenery is as lovely as that of Italy. What, then, prevents that fine country from having her own music? Many reasons may be assigned. In the first place, England has been cut off from the inheritance of her earliest music. Her earliest race, when they retired to the mountains of Wales, carried with them their language and song. Those strains, however wild and uncouth, which their bards poured out, would, if they had continued to be heard in England, to be listened to, rever ehced, cherished, and repeated from age to age, have become gradually mom and more polished and harmonious, while at the same time they would have been as strongly stamped with individual character as the music of any nation now is. The outpouring of the heart In song, the expression, in this form, of national character, the strains which nerved the rude war rior's arm, or which were thundered forth by victorious bands, would never have been lost but, even at this day, we should have heard strains, which perhaps struck terror into the hearts of Julius Caesar's troops, or which resounded through the mysterious groves of the Druids. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.