most valuable music writings we have. In some way they seem to explain
the music itself: and the composer at once becomes a close friend. But
besides these read the biographies. Then it is as if we were
personally invited home to the composer and shown all his ways and his
life. And besides these, there are some friendly books full of the
very best advice as to making us thoughtful musicians; many and many
again are the writers who have so loved art--not the art of tone
alone, but all other arts as well--that they have told us of it in
good and earnest books which are friendly, because they are written
from the right place; and that you must know by this time is the
heart.

You will soon see when you have read about the composers that true
music comes out of true life. Then you will begin to love true life,
to be useful, and to help others. But all these things do not come at
once. Yet, as we go along step by step, we learn that art is
unselfish, and we must be so to enjoy it; art is truthful--we must be
so to express it; art is full of life--we must know and live truth in
order to appreciate it. And the study of pure thoughts in music, in
books, and in our own life will help to all this.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE HANDS.

"The skill of their hands still lingers."--_John Ruskin._[52]

In one of our Talks, speaking about the thoughts in our hearts, we
said that they crept from the heart into our arms and hands, into the
music we play, and off to those who hear us, causing in them the
thoughts by which they judge us. Thus we see, that as Janus stands
sentinel at the doorway of the year, so the hands stand between the
secret world of thought within and the questioning world of curiosity
without.

If we were not in such a hurry usually, we might stop to think that
every one, all over the world, is training the hands for some purpose.
And such a variety of purposes! One strives to get skill with tools,
another is a conjurer, another spends his life among beautiful and
delicate plants, another reads with his fingers.[53] In any one of
these or of the countless other ways that the hands may be used, no
one may truly be said to have skill until delicacy has been gained.
Even in a forcible use of the hands there must be the greatest
delicacy in the guidance. You can readily see that when the hands are
working at the command of the heart they must be ever ready to make
evident the meaning of the heart, and that is expr