Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/103

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and its Green Border-Land.
89

once in three years there is the most luxurious banquet of music, lasting for four consecutive days, in the Town Hall. Nothing in England or Europe can equal it, both for place and performers. All present at the great Festival in 1867 must have carried away this impression. Well, the invalids and sufferers in the General Hospital had some, thing more and better than the crumbs that fell from this table so loaded with precious delicacies. The solos of Sweden's other nightingale, of Titiens, Sherrington, Reeves, and Santley, and the grand choruses that by turns lifted the entranced thousands half-way to heaven and held them there in sublime fascination, these did more than "raise a mortal to the skies"—they "drew an angel down" with cordials, medicines, good clothing, and tender watch and care for all the suffering inmates of the Hospital for a whole year long. Miriam's Song, in the "Israel in Egypt," gives songs of gladness and gratitude in a hundred nights to crippled scores of men and women within the dim, still wards of the asylum. The voices that swell and meander through the glorious harmonies of "Elijah" set a thousand ravens a-wing with sustenance and solace for these poor and afflicted children of suffering and sorrow.

The Queen's Hospital is another and supplementary institution of the same character and object. Among other means adopted for the sup-