More Praise for the Doctor’s Glassy-Chord

Last month I wrote about Benjamin Franklin’s musical invention, the glassy-chord or, as he rebranded it in 1762, the armonica.

Franklin brought one of those glass instruments back home to Philadelphia in the early 1760s and showed it to friends. He was already famous for his lightning rod, and this looked like another product of American scientific genius.

Among the people who heard the instrument was Nathaniel Evans, who turned twenty-one in 1763. Son of a merchant, he was one of the first boys to attend the Academy of Philadelphia, which Franklin had helped to found in 1750. Evans then served an apprenticeship in a mercantile countinghouse.

On coming of age, Evans decided he preferred the life of the mind and convinced the College of Philadelphia (the higher level of the academy, also co-founded by Franklin) to treat him as a graduate student. After earning a master’s degree in 1765, Evans sailed for London to take holy orders in the Church of England.

Franklin was back working in the imperial capital by then, too. He was no doubt pleased to see the poem that Evans placed in the London Chronicle for 31 Aug–3 Sept 1765. Indeed, Dr. Franklin might have had a hand in that publication.

Evans’s poem was headed “To Benjamin Franklin, esq; ll.d. f.r.s. Occasioned by hearing him play on the Armonica. Written in Philadelphia, 1763”:

Long had we, lost in grateful wonder, view’d
Each gen’rous act thy patriot soul pursu’d;
Our little State resounds thy just applause,
And pleas’d from thee new fame and honour draws.

Envy is now, by merit overthrown,
Oblig’d in thee superior worth to own.
The Muse to sacred virtue ever bound,
Beams the bright ray her glorious sons around;
And sure in thee those virtues are combin’d,
That form the true pre-eminence of mind.

How were we fixt with rapture and surprize,
When first you told the wonders of the skies!
By simple laws deducing truths sublime,
Before, deep-bosom’d in the womb of time.

With admiration struck, we did survey
The lambent lightnings innocently play,
And the red thunder from th’ ethereal round
Burst the black clouds and harmless smite the ground,
As down thy Rod was seen the dreaded fire,
In a swift flame to vanish and expire:
Blest use of art! apply’d to serve mankind,
The noble province of the sapient mind!

This, this be wisdom’s, this the sage’s claim,
To trace the godhead thro’ this wondrous frame;
For this the soul’s grand faculties were giv’n,
To search the chain connecting man with heav’n.
But not alone those weightier thoughts controul
Thy comprehensive far-pervading soul;
The softer studies thy regard command,
And rise with fair refinement from thy hand.

Aided by thee, Urania’s heavenly art
With finer raptures charms th’ extatic heart;
Th’ Armonica shall join the sacred choir,
Fresh transports kindle, and new joys inspire.
Hark! the soft warblings, rolling smooth and clear,
Strike with celestial ravishment the ear,
Conveying inward, as they sweetly roll,
A tide of melting music to the soul.

And sure if aught of mortal-moving strain,
Can touch with joy the high angelic train,
’Tis such a pure transcendent sound divine
As breathes this heart-enchanting frame of thine.
Shall not the Muse her slender tribute pay?
Her’s is no venal, but the grateful lay;
Apollo bids it, where such virtues shine,
And pours a graceful sweetness thro’ each line;
Her country too, responsive to the sound,
Swells the full note, and tells it all around.

After being ordained, Nathaniel Evans returned to America. With the sponsorship of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, he became the Anglican minister in Haddonfield, New Jersey. But the young Rev. Mr. Evans died only two years later of tuberculosis.

In 1772, the head of the College of Philadelphia, the Rev. Dr. William Smith, published a collection of Evans’s poems. The young minister had bequeathed a manuscript to Smith and a young lady he’d met on his trip home who also wrote poetry. The published collection included this poem about Franklin’s armonica, but a version that conveys the same message in less than two-thirds the length.