"
A more modern poet in affectionate remembrance thus sings the fugue:--
"A fugue let loose cheers up the place,
With bass and tenor, alto, air,
The parts strike in with measured grace,
And something sweet is everywhere.
"As if some warbling brood should build
Of bits of tunes a singing nest;
Each bringing that with which it thrilled
And weaving it with all the rest."
All public worshippers in the meetings one hundred years ago did not,
however, regard fuguing as "something sweet everywhere," nor did they agree
with Billings and Byles as to its angelic and ecstatic properties. Some
thought it "heartless, tasteless, trivial, and irreverent jargon." Others
thought the tunes were written more for the absurd inflation of the singers
than for the glory of God; and many fully sympathized with the man who
hung two cats over Billings's door to indicate his opinion of Billings's
caterwauling. An old inhabitant of Roxbury remembered that when fuguing
tunes were introduced into his church "they produced a literally fuguing
effect on the older people, who went out of the church as soon as the first
verse was sung." One scandalized and belligerent old clergyman, upon the
Sabbath following the introduction of fuguing into his church, preached
upon the prophecy of Amos, "The songs of the temple shall be turned
into howling," while another took for his text the sixth verse of the
seventeenth chapter of Acts, "Those that have turned the world upside down,
are come hither also.
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