f the Future," let us take a swift survey of music as a medium
of expression for the beautiful, and some of the forms which it has
assumed.

This Ariel of the fine arts sends its messages to the human soul by
virtue of a fourfold capacity: Firstly, the imitation of the voices
of Nature, such as the winds, the waves, and the cries of animals;
secondly, its potential delight as melody, modulation, rhythm,
harmony--in other words, its simple worth as a "thing of beauty,"
without regard to cause or consequence; thirdly, its force of boundless
suggestion; fourthly, that affinity for union with the more definite
and exact forms of the imagination (poetry), by which the intellectual
context of the latter is raised to a far higher power of grace, beauty,
passion, sweetness, without losing individuality of outline--like,
indeed, the hazy aureole which painters set on the brow of the man
Jesus, to fix the seal of the ultimate Divinity. Though several or all
of these may be united in the same composition, each musical work may
be characterized in the main as descriptive, sensuous, suggestive, or
dramatic, according as either element contributes most largely to its
purpose. Simple melody or harmony appeals mostly to the sensuous love
of sweet sounds. The symphony does this in an enlarged and complicated
sense, but is still more marked by the marvelous suggestive energy
with which it unlocks all the secret raptures of fancy, floods the
border-lands of thought with a glory not to be found on sea or land,
and paints ravishing pictures, that come and go like dreams, with colors
drawn from the "twelve-tinted tone-spectrum."

Shelley describes this peculiar influence of music in his "Prometheus
Unbound," with exquisite beauty and truth:

"My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
And thine doth like an angel sit
Beside the helm conducting it,
While all the waves with melody are ringing.
It seems to float ever, forever,
Upon that many-winding river,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses."

As the symphony best expresses the suggestive potency in music, the
operatic form incarnates its capacity of definite thought, and the
expression of that thought. The term "lyric," as applied to the genuine
operatic conception, is a misnomer. Under the accepted operatic form,
however, it has relative t