I have sometimes thought that only the elevated and elegant language of poetry should be employed in describing music: for music is poetry, and poetry is music; that is, in many of their characteristics they are one and the same. But, to put this idea in another form, let us say that Music is the beautiful sister of Poetry, that other soul-expressing medium; and who would create the latter must commune with the former, and be able to bring to his uses the sweet and finishing graces of her rhythmic forms. In early times, the qualities of the poet and musician were generally actually united in the same person. The poet usually set to music, and in most instances sang, his effusions. Nor to this day have the

"Poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays,"

ceased to sing, in bewitching verse, the noble qualities of music.

I have said that music speaks a language all its own, and one that is universal. Bring together a representation of all the nations of the earth, in which body there shall be a very Babel of tongues. All will be confusion until the all-penetrating, the all-thrilling voice of music is heard. At once, silence reigns; each ear quickly catches and recognizes the delicious sounds. The language of each one in the concourse may be different: but with "music's golden tongue" all are alike innately acquainted; each heart beats in sympathy with the delightful, absorbing tones of melody; and all seem members of one nation.

Again: music may be called that strangely peculiar form of the beautiful, whose presence seems, indeed is, appropriate on occasions the most diverse in character. Its aid is sought alike to add to the joys of festive scenes, to soothe and elevate the heart on occasions of mourning, and to enhance the solemnity, the excellence, of divine worship.

The poet Collins, aptly associating music with the good and beautiful, calls it the "heavenly maid."

Martin Luther, himself a musical composer and performer of merit, paused in his great work of religious reform to declare, "I verily think, and am not ashamed to say, that, next to divinity, no art is comparable to music." And Disraeli utters this noble thought: "Were it not for music, we might in these days say the beautiful is dead."

"Touching musical harmony, whether by instrument or by voice, it being but of high and low in sounds a proportionable disposition, such, notwithstanding, is the force thereof, and so pleasing effects it hath in that part of man which is most divine, that some have thereby been induced to think that the soul itself is or hath in it harmony: a thing which delighteth all ages, and beseemeth all states; a thing as seasonable in grief as in joy; as decent being added unto actions of greatest weight and solemnity as being used when men most sequester themselves from action. The reason hereof is an admirable facility which music hath to express and represent to the mind, more inwardly than any other sensible means, the very steps and inflections of every way, the turns and varieties of all passion whereunto the mind is subject."[1]

"I would fain know what music is. I seek it as a man seeks eternal wisdom. Yesterday evening I walked, late in the moonlight, in the beautiful avenue of lime-trees on the bank of the Rhine; and I heard a tapping noise and soft singing. At the door of a cottage, under the blooming lime-tree, sat a mother and her twin-babies: the one lay at her breast, the other in a cradle, which she rocked with her foot, keeping time to her singing. In the very germ, then, when the first trace of life begins to stir, music is the nurse of the soul: it murmurs in the ear, and the child sleeps; the tones are the companions of his dreams; they are the world in which he lives. He has nothing; the babe, although cradled in his mother's arms, is alone in the spirit: but tones find entrance into the half-conscious soul, and nourish it as earth nourishes the life of plants."[2]