The effect of music on patients
suffering from nervous depression is as well known now as it was in
Saul's day; Shakespeare knew something about it. His physicians are
sometimes admirable; the great nervous specialist called in on Lady
Macbeth's case is a model of wisdom and discretion: the specialist
that Queen Cordelia summoned to prescribe for her father, after
giving him trional, or something of that nature, was careful to have
his return to consciousness accompanied by suitable music. Such
terrible fits of melancholy as afflicted Saul were called in the Old
Testament the visitations of an evil spirit; and there is no better
diagnosis today. The Russian novelist Turgenev suffered exactly in
the manner in which Browning describes Saul's sickness of heart: for
several days he would remain in an absolute lethargy, like the
king-serpent in his winter sleep. And, as in the case of Saul, music
helped him more than medicine.
When David had carried the music to its fullest extent, the spirit
of prophecy came upon him, as in the Messianic Psalms, and in the
eighteenth stanza, he joyfully infers from the combination of man's
love and man's weakness, that God's love is equal to God's power.
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