to wit, wife, children, a friend or two, and a house --
two other things are necessary. These are a good fire and good music.
And inasmuch as we can do without the fire for half the year,
I may say music is the one essential." "Late explorers say they have found
some nations that have no God; but I have not read of any that had no music."
"Music means harmony, harmony means love, love means -- God!"
==

The theoretical relation between music and poetry would hardly
have attracted his study had it not been that his mind
was as truly philosophically and scientifically accurate,
as it was poetically sensuous and imaginative. In a letter
to Mr. E. C. Stedman he complained that "in all directions
the poetic art was suffering from the shameful circumstance that criticism
was without a scientific basis for even the most elementary of its judgments."

Although the work was irksome to him, he could not go on
writing at hap-hazard, trusting to his own mere taste to decide what was good,
until he had settled for himself scientifically what are the laws
of poetical construction. This accounts for his exposition
of the laws of beauty in that unique work, "The Science of English Verse",
which was based on Dante's thought, "The best conceptions cannot be
save where science and genius are." The book is chiefly taken up
with a discussion of rhythm and tone-color in verse; and it is
well within the truth to say that it is the most complete and thorough
original investigation of the formal element in poetry in existence.
The rhythm he treated as the marking of definite time measurements,
which could be indicated by bars in musical notation,
having their regular time and their regular number of notes,
with their proper accent. To this time measurement Mr. Lanier gave