a gradual, unobtrusive manner; and this is the inference to which our argument points.  Further evidence to the same effect is supplied by Greek history.  The early poems of the Greeks—­which, be it remembered, were sacred legends embodied in that rhythmical, metaphorical language which strong feeling excites—­were not recited, but chanted:  the tones and the cadences were made musical by the same influences which made the speech poetical.

By those who have investigated the matter, this chanting is believed to have been not what we call singing, but nearly allied to our recitative (far simpler indeed, if we may judge from the fact that the early Greek lyre, which had but four strings, was played in unison with the voice, which was therefore confined to four notes), and as such, much less remote from common speech than our own singing is.  For recitative, or musical recitation, is in all respects intermediate between speech and song.  Its average effects are not so loud as those of song.  Its tones are less sonorous in timbre than those of song.  Commonly it diverges to a smaller extent from the middle notes—­uses notes neither so high nor so low in pitch.  The intervals habitual to it are neither so wide nor so varied.  Its rate of variation is not so rapid.  And at the same time that its primary rhythm is less decided, it has none of that secondary rhythm produced by recurrence of the same or parallel musical phrases, which is one of the marked characteristics of song.  Thus, then, we may not only infer, from the evidence furnished by existing barbarous tribes, that the vocal music of pre-historic times was emotional speech very slightly exalted; but we see that the earliest vocal music of which we have any account differed much less from emotional speech than does the vocal music of our days.

That recitative—­beyond which, by the way, the Chinese and Hindoos seem never to have advanced—­grew naturally out of the modulations and cadences of strong feeling, we have indeed still current evidence.  There are even now to be met with occasions on which strong feeling vents itself in this form.  Whoever has been present when a meeting of Quakers was addressed by one of their preachers (whose practice it is to speak only under the influence of religious emotion), must have been struck by the quite unusual tones, like those of a subdued chant, in which the address was made.  It is clear, too, that the intoning used in some churches is representative of this same mental state; and has been adopted on account of the instinctively felt congruity between it and the contrition, supplication, or reverence verbally expressed.