e spontaneity, and, while it has no external
significance, it bears no internal curse. It is something to which a few
spirits may well surrender themselves, sure that in a liberal
commonwealth they will be thanked for their ideal labour, the fruits of
which many may enjoy. Such excursions into ultra-mundane regions, where
order is free, refine the mind and make it familiar with perfection. By
analogy an ideal form comes to be conceived and desiderated in other
regions, where it is not produced so readily, and the music heard, as
the Pythagoreans hoped, makes the soul also musical.

[Sidenote: Its inherent emotions.]

It must be confessed, however, that a world of sounds and rhythms, all
about nothing, is a by-world and a mere distraction for a political
animal. Its substance is air, though the spell of it may have moral
affinities. Nevertheless this ethereal art may be enticed to earth and
married with what is mortal. Music interests humanity most when it is
wedded to human events. The alliance comes about through the emotions
which music and life arouse in common. For sound, in sweeping through
the body and making felt there its kinetic and potential stress,
provokes no less interest than does any other physical event or
premonition. Music can produce emotion as directly as can fighting or
love. If in the latter instances the body's whole life may be in
jeopardy, this fact is no explanation of our concern; for many a danger
is not felt and there is no magic in the body's future condition, that
it should now affect the soul. What touches the soul is the body's
condition at the moment; and this is altered no less truly by a musical
impression than by some protective or reproductive act. If emotions
accompany the latter, they might as well accompany the former; and in
fact they do. Nor is music the only idle cerebral commotion that enlists
attention and presents issues no less momentous for being quite
imaginary; dreams do the same, and seldom can the real crises of life so
absorb the soul, or prompt it to such extreme efforts, as can delirium
in sickness, or delusion in what passes for health.

[Sidenote: In growing specific they remain unearthly.]

There is perhaps no emotion incident to human life that music cannot
render in its abstract medium by suggesting the pang of it; though of
course music cannot describe the complex situation which lends earthly
passions their specific colour. It is by fusion with many sugge