rruption of our work as we do a false note
in music, and are mightily enamored of ourselves afterward for the power
of application which was simply inability to desist. In this rhythm of
toil is to be found the charm of industry. Toil has in itself no spell
to conjure with, but its recurrences of molecular action, cerebral and
muscular, are as delightful as rhyme.

Such of our pleasures as require movements equally rhythmic with those
entailed by labor are almost equally agreeable, with the added advantage
of being useless. Dancing, which is not only rhythmic movement, pure and
simple, undebased with any element of utility, but is capable of
performance under conditions positively baneful, is for these reasons
the most engaging of them all; and if it were but one-half as wicked as
the prudes have endeavored by method of naughty suggestion to make it
would lack of absolute bliss nothing but the other half.

This ever active and unabatable something within us which compels us
always to be marking time we may call, for want of a better name, the
instinct of rhythm. It is the aesthetic principle of our nature.
Translated into words it has given us poetry; into sound, music; into
motion, dancing. Perhaps even painting may be referred to it, space
being the correlative of time, and color the correlative of tone. We are
fond of arranging our minute intervals of time into groups. We find
certain of these groups highly agreeable, while others are no end
unpleasant. In the former there is a singular regularity to be observed,
which led hard-headed old Leibnitz to the theory that our delight in
music arises from an inherent affection for mathematics. Yet musicians
have hitherto obtained but indifferent recognition for feats of
calculation, nor have the singing and playing of renowned mathematicians
been unanimously commended by good judges.

Music so intensifies and excites the instinct of rhythm that a strong
volition is required to repress its physical expression. The
universality of this is well illustrated by the legend, found in some
shape in many countries and languages, of the boy with the fiddle who
compels king, cook, peasant, clown, and all that kind of people, to
follow him through the land; and in the myth of the Pied Piper of
Hamelin we discern abundant reason to think the instinct of rhythm an
attribute of rats. Soldiers march so much livelier with music than
without that it has been found a tolerably good substitu