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Did you ever sit on a winter’s evening before an old fashioned open fireplace, with its andirons, and its blazing log of wood? As you sit there and watch the fire playing about the log, you begin to hear a soft sound, a clear musical note, perhaps, or a tender, quavering strain, plaintive and sad. It takes every tone as it sings on. Sometimes it is like a whole chorus of bird songs; then again it dies away into a faint murmur. What is it? Are there birds hidden in the chimney that give out these strange notes? Are there invisible spirits hovering about the room, that breathe out these plaintive strains? No; the music comes from the log in the fire. The flames bring it out. A poet would say that long ago in the forest the birds sat on the branches of the tree from which this back log was taken, and sang there, and the songs hid away in the wood, where they have remained ever since. Or, he would say that the winds sighted and murmured through the branches in gentle summer breezes, or swept through them in furious storms, and that the music of the breezes and storms has been imprisoned in the heart of the tree all these many years. And now the heat brings out this long slumbering music.
These are only poetic fancies, so far as the weird music of the log on the hearth is concerned; but it is no mere fancy that the sweetest, fullest music of the hour is not drawn out until in the heat of trial. The bird notes of joy that warble about our ears in the sunny days of childhood and youth sink into the heart and hide there. The lessons, the influences, the gladness, the peace of quiet, prosperous days seem to have been lost. The life does not appear to yield its true measure of joyfulness. Then the fires of trial come and kindle about it, and in the flames the long gathered and imprisoned music is set free and flows out. Many a rejoicing Christian never learned to sing till the flames kindled upon him.