from such a nature tones and changes of voice more marked than those called forth from an ordinary nature—­will generate just those exaggerations which we have found to distinguish the lower vocal music from emotional speech, and the higher vocal music from the lower.  Thus it becomes credible that the four-toned recitative of the early Greek poets (like all poets, nearly allied to composers in the comparative intensity of their feelings), was really nothing more than the slightly exaggerated emotional speech natural to them, which grew by frequent use into an organised form.  And it is readily conceivable that the accumulated agency of subsequent poet-musicians, inheriting and adding to the products of those who went before them, sufficed, in the course of the ten centuries which we know it took, to develop this four-toned recitative into a vocal music having a range of two octaves.

Not only may we so understand how more sonorous tones, greater extremes of pitch, and wider intervals, were gradually introduced; but also how there arose a greater variety and complexity of musical expression.  For this same passionate, enthusiastic temperament, which naturally leads the musical composer to express the feelings possessed by others as well as himself, in extremer intervals and more marked cadences than they would use, also leads him to give musical utterance to feelings which they either do not experience, or experience in but slight degrees.  In virtue of this general susceptibility which distinguishes him, he regards with emotion, events, scenes, conduct, character, which produce upon most men no appreciable effect.  The emotions so generated, compounded as they are of the simpler emotions, are not expressible by intervals and cadences natural to these, but by combinations of such intervals and cadences:  whence arise more involved musical phrases, conveying more complex, subtle, and unusual feelings.  And thus we may in some measure understand how it happens that music not only so strongly excites our more familiar feelings, but also produces feelings we never had before—­arouses dormant sentiments of which we had not conceived the possibility and do not know the meaning; or, as Richter says—­tells us of things we have not seen and shall not see.

* * * * *

Indirect evidences of several kinds remain to be briefly pointed out.  One of them is the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of otherwise accounting for the expressiveness of music.  Whence comes it that special combinations of notes should have special effects upon our emotions?—­that one should give us a feeling of exhilaration, another of melancholy, another of affection, another of reverence?  Is it that these special combinations have intrinsic meanings apart from the human constitution?—­that a certain number of aerial waves per second, followed by a certain other number, in the nature of things signify grief, while in the reverse order they signify