with the maiden in the graceful mazes of the gay Mazourka; she inflames
the savage in the barbaric clang of the fierce war-dance; or marks the
measured tramp of the drilled soldiery of civilization. She is in the
court of kings; she makes eloquent the ripe lip of the cultured beauty;
she chants in the dreary cell of the hermit; she lightens the dusty
wallet of the wanderer. She glitters through the dreams of the Poet; she
breathes through the direst tragedies of noblest souls. On--on she
floats through the wide world, everywhere present, everywhere welcome,
refining, and consecrating our dull life from the Baptismal Font to the
Grave!

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