plying this.
Instances in abundance may be cited, showing that musical composers are
men of extremely acute sensibilities. The Life of Mozart depicts him as
one of intensely active affections and highly impressionable
temperament. Various anecdotes represent Beethoven as very susceptible
and very passionate. Mendelssohn is described by those who knew him to
have been full of fine feeling. And the almost incredible sensitiveness
of Chopin has been illustrated in the memoirs of George Sand. An
unusually emotional nature being thus the general characteristic of
musical composers, we have in it just the agency required for the
development of recitative and song. Intenser feeling producing intenser
manifestations, any cause of excitement will call forth from such a
nature tones and changes of voice more marked than those called forth
from an ordinary nature--will generate just those exaggerations which we
have found to distinguish the lower vocal music from emotional speech,
and the higher vocal music from the lower. Thus it becomes credible that
the four-toned recitative of the early Greek poets (like all poets,
nearly allied to composers in the comparative intensity of their
feelings), was really nothing more than the slightly exaggerated
emotional speech natural to them, which grew by frequent use into an
organised form. And it is readily conceivable that the accumulated
agency of subsequent poet-musicians, inheriting and adding to the
products of those who went before them, sufficed, in the course of the
ten centuries which we know it took, to develop this four-toned
recitative into a vocal music having a range of two octaves.

Not only may we so understand how more sonorous tones, greater extremes
of pitch, and wider intervals, were gradually introduced; but also how
there arose a greater variety and complexity of musical expression. For
this same passionate, enthusiastic temperament, which naturally leads
the musical composer to express the feelings possessed by others as well
as himself, in extremer intervals and more marked cadences than they
would use, also leads him to give musical utterance to feelings which
they either do not experience, or experience in but slight degrees. In
virtue of this general susceptibility which distinguishes him, he
regards with emotion, events, scenes, conduct, character, which produce
upon most men no appreciable effect. The emotions so generated,
compounded as they are of the simpler