music, and therefore that they are purely passive to its effects. But
this is not so; it is by the reaction of the mind upon the notices of the
ear (the _matter_ coming by the senses, the _form_ from the mind) that
the pleasure is constructed, and therefore it is that people of equally
good ear differ so much in this point from one another. Now, opium, by
greatly increasing the activity of the mind, generally increases, of
necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to
construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate
intellectual pleasure. But, says a friend, a succession of musical
sounds is to me like a collection of Arabic characters; I can attach no
ideas to them. Ideas! my good sir? There is no occasion for them; all
that class of ideas which can be available in such a case has a language
of representative feelings. But this is a subject foreign to my present
purposes; it is sufficient to say that a chorus, &c., of elaborate
harmony displayed before me, as in a piece of arras work, the whole of my
past life--not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and
incarnated in the music; no longer painful to dwell upon; but the detail
of its incidents removed or blended in some hazy abstraction, and its
passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All this was to be had
for five shillings. And over and above the music of the stage and the
orchestra, I had all around me, in the intervals of the performance, the
music of the Italian language talked by Italian women--for the gallery
was usually crowded with Italians--and I listened with a pleasure such as
that with which Weld the traveller lay and listened, in Canada, to the
sweet laughter of Indian women; for the less you understand of a
language, the more sensible you are to the melody or harshness of its
sounds. For such a purpose, therefore, it was an advantage to me that I
was a poor Italian scholar, reading it but little, and not speaking it at
all, nor understanding a tenth part of what I heard spoken.