The sadness is ours.  The Indian poet Calidas says in the Sacontala:  “Perhaps the sadness of men on seeing beautiful forms and hearing sweet music arises from some faint remembrance of past joys, and the traces of connections in a former state of existence.”  As polishing expresses the vein in marble, and grain in wood, so music brings out what of heroic lurks anywhere.  The hero is the sole patron of music.  That harmony which exists naturally between the hero’s moods and the universe the soldier would fain imitate with drum and trumpet.  When we are in health all sounds fife and drum for us; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn.  Marching is when the pulse of the hero beats in unison with the pulse of Nature, and he steps to the measure of the universe; then there is true courage and invincible strength.

Plutarch says that “Plato thinks the gods never gave men music, the science of melody and harmony, for mere delectation or to tickle the ear; but that the discordant parts of the circulations and beauteous fabric of the soul, and that of it that roves about the body, and many times, for want of tune and air, breaks forth into many extravagances and excesses, might be sweetly recalled and artfully wound up to their former consent and agreement.”

Music is the sound of the universal laws promulgated.  It is the only assured tone.  There are in it such strains as far surpass any man’s faith in the loftiness of his destiny.  Things are to be learned which it will be worth the while to learn.  Formerly I heard these

         ^Rumors from an Aeolian Harp^.

There is a vale which none hath seen,
Where foot of man has never been,
Such as here lives with toil and strife,
An anxious and a sinful life.

There every virtue has its birth,
Ere it descends upon the earth,
And thither every deed returns,
Which in the generous bosom burns.

     There love is warm, and youth is young,
     And poetry is yet unsung,
     For Virtue still adventures there,
     And freely breathes her native air.

     And ever, if you hearken well,
     You still may hear its vesper bell,
     And tread of high-souled men go by,
     Their thoughts conversing with the sky.

According to Jamblichus, “Pythagoras did not procure for himself a thing of this kind through instruments or the voice, but employing a certain ineffable divinity, and which it is difficult to apprehend, he extended his ears and fixed his intellect in the sublime symphonies of the world, he alone hearing and understanding, as it appears, the universal harmony and consonance of the spheres, and the stars that are moved through them, and which produce a fuller and more intense melody than anything effected by mortal sounds.”