All the inner processes of life are guarded by the hand of nature.  In vain would the curiosity of the scalpel knife invade the sanctuary of the beating heart to lay open the burning mystery of Being.  The outraged Life retreats before it to its last citadel, and the indignant heart, upon its entrance, refuses to throb more.  The citadel is taken; but the secret of Life is not to be discovered in the kingdom of Death.  It is because Music is essentially a living art that we find it impossible to read the mystery of its being.  If Painting touch us, we can always trace the emotion to its exciting cause; if we weep over the pages of the Poet, it is because we find our own blighted hopes imaged there.  But why does Music sway us?  Where did we learn that language without words? in what consists its mystic affinities with our spirits?  Why does the harp of David soothe the insanity of Saul?  Is not its festal voice too triumphant to be the accompaniment of our own sad, fallen being; its breath of sorrow too divine to be the echo of our petty cares?  All other arts arise from the facts of our earthly existence, but Music has no external archetype, and refuses to submit her ethereal soul to our curious analysis. ’I am so, because so I am,’ is the only answer she gives to the queries of materialism.  Like the primitive rock, the skeleton of earth’s burning heart, she looms up through the base of our existence.  Addressing herself to some mystic faculty born before thought or language, she lulls the suffering baby into its first sleep, using perhaps the primeval and universal language of the race.  For the love which receives the New Born, cadences the monotonous chant; and human sympathies are felt by the innocent and confiding infant before his eyes are opened fully upon the light, before his tongue can syllable a word, his ear detect their divisions, or his mind divine their significations.  But Music looms not only through the base of our being; like the encompassing sky, her arch spans our horizon.  Lo! is it not the language through which the Angels convey the secrets of their profound adoration to the Heart of God!

’Having every one of them harps’—­’and they sung a new song’—­in which are to join ’every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea’—­’and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands.’  (Revelation, chap, v.)

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While Angelo linked the fiery tones in rhythmed laws, Zophiel sketched with glowing pen the joys of virtue, the glories of the intellect, and the pleasures, pains, raptures, woes, and loves of the heart.  The deeds of heroes were sung in Epic; Dramas, Elegies, and Lyrics syllabled the inner life; men listened to the ennobling strains, and became freemen as they heard.  The intermingling flow of high thought and melodious measures elevated and soothed the soul, and love for, and faith in, humanity, were awakened and nourished by the true Poet.