e the
custom to sing the lyric and recite the epic--poetry proper was born. As
during the same period musical instruments were being multiplied, we may
presume that music came to have an existence apart from words. And both
of them were beginning to assume other forms besides the religious.
Facts having like implications might be cited from the histories of
later times and peoples; as the practices of our own early minstrels,
who sang to the harp heroic narratives versified by themselves to music
of their own composition: thus uniting the now separate offices of poet,
composer, vocalist, and instrumentalist. But, without further
illustration, the common origin and gradual differentiation of Dancing,
Poetry, and Music will be sufficiently manifest.

The advance from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous is displayed not
only in the separation of these arts from each other and from religion,
but also in the multiplied differentiations which each of them
afterwards undergoes. Not to dwell upon the numberless kinds of dancing
that have, in course of time, come into use: and not to occupy space in
detailing the progress of poetry, as seen in the development of the
various forms of metre, of rhyme, and of general organization; let us
confine our attention to music as a type of the group. As implied by the
customs of still extant barbarous races, the first musical instruments
were, without doubt, percussive--sticks, calabashes, tom-toms--and were
used simply to mark the time of the dance; and in this constant
repetition of the same sound, we see music in its most homogeneous form.
The Egyptians had a lyre with three strings. The early lyre of the
Greeks had four, constituting their tetrachord. In course of some
centuries lyres of seven and eight strings were employed; and, by the
expiration of a thousand years, they had advanced to their "great
system" of the double octave. Through all which changes there of course
arose a greater heterogeneity of melody. Simultaneously there came into
use the different modes--Dorian, Ionian, Phrygian, AEolian, and
Lydian--answering to our keys; and of these there were ultimately
fifteen. As yet, however, there was but little heterogeneity in the time
of their music. Instrumental music being at first merely the
accompaniment of vocal music, and vocal music being subordinated to
words,--the singer being also the poet, chanting his own compositions
and making the lengths of his notes agree with t