Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. The Secret Of The Power Of Patriotic Song. 1. Were we to ask the secret of this transcendent power of patriotic song, I think it would be found consisting mainly in the principle of association of ideas ? of ideas so completely correlated that the latter of necessity brings up a long and brilliant train which, in the hallowed glow of feeling music only can impart, come trooping in upon the mind with a redoubled strength and splendor. A patriotic song is an enchanted key to memory’s deepest cells; it touches secret springs, it kindles sacred flames in chambers of the soul unvisited by other agencies. It wakes to life ten thousand slumbering chords and makes them thrill and pulsate?just as if some loving angel’s finger touched them?to the grand God- given sentiment of liberty. A patriotic song, like the enchanter’s magic wand, calls up the honored forms from
Fame’s eternal camping ground;
it makes the immortal patriots live and breathe again; reveals the long lines of gleaming bayonets on the battle-field; renews the headlong charge of the impetuous cavalry; repeats again the wild huzza of the invincible phalanx of the infantry; makes us hear once more the exulting scream of victory, and points our moistened eye to the torn and bloodied flag still fluttering in the breeze, and to the nation, rocked by the scathing tempest, righting itself once more beneath the rainbow of enchanting peace flung sweetly over it. We hear a patriotic song in boyhood from the lips of an honored sire who has filled our greedy ear with the wild adventures of his old campaigns; we listen to the rousing strain on some cold winter evening by the ample hearthstone? the rude queen’s arm with battered stock, still hanging in its leathern loop above the mantle piece ? we hear the grand …