to describe the effect upon you of a piece of music by calling up such images, associations, trains of thought, analogous effects in other spheres, as it may have awakened in your mind. You clutch at all these feeble helps in your enthusiastic, vain endeavors to describe the witching thing. This you may do legitimately, so long as you profess no more, and do not try to reverse the order, and make it appear that the music was written to describe your thought. For here we find the true relation between thought and feeling in the sphere of music. Music in one sense describes, by awakening the feelings with which objects, thoughts, experiences, are inevitably associated; every such feeling may of course awaken many images and many memories in many minds; but there will be, at least, some vague analogy, affinity between them; so that music, even of the most pure and abstract sort (such as a stringed quartette by Mozart), is always heard to best advantage on the fit occasion. If it be wedded to words, as in a song, an opera, an oratorio, these in a measure must determine its expression, though it bring out new meanings such as the words alone could hardly have conveyed. Yet take the words away, the music could not be translated into them, would not enable you to find them, though it would put you in a state of mind and feeling in which those or kindred thoughts and words might offer themselves most aptly.

This brings us to the heart of the matter. Leaving objections, we come back to positive statement. The highest definition of music, its full significance and worth, is to be sought mainly in the highest kind of music; that is to say, pure music, dealing in purely musical ideas, conscious of no outward purpose, content in its own world, preoccupied with its own peculiar mission, which is too divine to need the justification of any end to serve. This, indeed, is the first principle of truth in art of any kind.

In this we find the intellectuality of music. For music, in this view, is the most abstract, pure embodiment and type of universal law and movement. It is a key to the divine method throughout all the ordered distribution of the worlds of matter and of spirit. It is the most fluid, free expression of form, in the becoming (what the Germans call das Werden); form developing according to intrinsic and divine necessity. There is nothing arbitrary in music; no acquiring any power in it except by patient, reverent study and mastering of divine proportions and the eternal laws of fitness. Goethe says: "The worth of art appears most eminent in music, since it requires no material, no subject-matter, whose effect must be deducted; it is wholly form and power, and it raises and ennobles whatever it expresses."

Hence the study of the laws of fugue and counterpoint, the subtile art of what is called the polyphonic interweaving of the parts in harmony, the

learning to develop out of a little melodic phrase of theme or motive, as from a seed-thought, all the wealth of meaning and of beauty there concealed and waiting for the touch of fairy wand of genius, is at least as good a kind of higher intellectual gymnastics as the transcendental mathematics, or the categorical chains of logic, or the perpetually shifting, vanishing cloud-forms of metaphysics. Good music has a logic of its own; none more severe, more subtile, and surely none so fascinating, for it leads, it charms into the infinite.

Even to contemplate the elementary phenomena in nature, upon which all the wonders of the musical art are founded, is to find ourselves in presence of enchanting facts, of laws so intellectual, so inexhaustible in their suggestion, such startling revelations of an infinitely beautiful organic, all-pervading, living order, that the soul is filled with awe as if the very air were tremulous with Deity. For what is music? Its substance, common air. Its form, vibration. All beauty, in whatever art, is the result, the impressed form of motion,-free, unimpeded, even motion; and motion, movement, is the universal sign and undeniable assertion of force, of power, of inspiration, in a word, of life; and, finally, all free, undisturbed motion is vibratory, undulating, measured, proportionate, rhythmical. Physically, then, music is motion, and it is nothing else. And nothing moves that does not impress upon the air a vibration, or (which is the same thing) a sound, a tone. If I sing to you, a vibration of my soul, my feeling, imparts itself to the atmospheric medium, traveling on until it becomes a vibration in your soul, your feeling. The spiritual fact of music answers to this physical fact. Its business is directly with the motive principle in human life, and not with thoughts, perceptions, memories; for these are passive, prompted by some motive force behind them.

THE

Sylvester Judd.

BORN in Westhampton, Mass., 1813. DIED in Augusta, Me., 1853.

A CHILD'S SUNDAY A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

[Margaret. 1851.]

HE Via Dolorosa became to Margaret to-day a via jocundissima, a very pleasant way. Through what some would consider rough woods and bleak pasture-land, in a little sheep-track, crooked and sometimes steep, over her hung like a white cloud the wild thorn-tree-large

gold-dusted cymes of viburnums, rose-blooming lambkill, and other sorts, suggested all she knew, and more than she knew, of the Gardens of Princes. The feathery moss on the old rocks, dewy and glistening, was full of fairy feeling. A chorus of fly-catchers, as in ancient Greek worship, from their invisible gallery in the greenwood, responded one to another; "Whee whoo whee, wee woo woo wee, whee whoo, whoo whoo wee-God bless the little Margaret! How glad we are she is going to Meeting at last. She shall have berries, nutcakes, and good preaching. The little Isabel and Job Luce are there. How do you think she will like Miss Amy?"

Emerging in Deacon Hadlock's Pasture, she added to her stock red sorrel blossoms, pink azaleas, and sprigs of pennyroyal. Then she sorted her collection, tying the different parcels with spears of grass. The Town was before her silent and motionless, save the neighing of horses and squads of dogs that traipsed to and fro on the Green. The sky was blue and tender; the clouds in white veils, like nuns, worshipped in the sunbeams; the woods behind murmured their reverence; and birds sang psalms. All these sights, sounds, odors, suggestions, were not, possibly, distinguished by Margaret, in their sharp individuality, or realized in the bulk of their shade, sense, and character. She had not learned to criticise; she only knew how to feel. A new indefinable sensation of joy and hope was deepened within her, and a single concentration of all best influences swelled her bosom. She took off her hat and pricked grass-heads and bluebells in the band, and went on. The intangible presence of God was in her soul, the universal voice of Jesus called her forward. Besides she was about to penetrate the profoundly interesting anagogue of the Meeting, that for which every seventh day she had heard the bell so mysteriously ring, that to which Obed and his mother devoted so much gravity, awe, and costume, and that concerning which a whole life's prohibition had been upon her. Withal, she remembered the murderer, and directed her first steps to the Jail.

She tried to enter the Jail House, but Mr. Shooks drove her away. Then she searched along the fence till she found a crevice in the posts of which the enclosure was made, and through this, on the ground-floor of the prison, within the very small aperture that served him for a window, she saw the grim face of the murderer, or a dim image of his face, like the shadow of a soul in the pit of the grave.

"I have brought the flowers," said she; "but they won't let me carry them to you."

"There is no more

"We know it," replied the imprisoned voice. world now, and flowers don't grow on it; it's hell, and beautiful things, and hearts to love you, are burnt up. There was blood spilt, and this is the afterwards."