" Still a third time he "set Windsor tune;" they "ran
over into Oxford do what I would." These unseemly "running overs" became
so common that ere long each singer "set the tune" at his own will and the
loudest-voiced carried the day. A writer of the time, Rev. Thomas Walter,
says of this reign of _concordia discors_: "The tunes are now
miserably tortured and twisted and quavered, in some Churches, into a
horrid Medly of confused and disorderly Voices. Our tunes are left to the
Mercy of every unskilful Throat to chop and alter, to twist and change,
according to their infinitely divers and no less Odd Humours and Fancies.
I have myself paused twice in one note to take breath. No two Men in the
Congregation quaver alike or together, it sounds in the Ears of a Good
Judge like five hundred different Tunes roared out at the same Time, with
perpetual Interfearings with one another."
Still, confused and poor as was the singing, it was a source of pure and
unceasing delight to the Puritan colonists,--one of the rare pleasures they
possessed,--a foretaste of heaven;
"for all we know
Of what the blessed do above
Is that they sing and that they love."
And to even that remnant of music--their few jumbled cacophonous
melodies--they clung with a devotion almost phenomenal.
Nor should we underrate the cohesive power that psalm-singing proved in the
early communities; it was one of the most potent influences in gathering
and holding the colonists together in love.
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