"No!" he said presently, "I'm _not_ overdoing it. My judgment of
Jonathan Bull is no longer a sudden enthusiasm, as the natural effort of
a man to make his own discoveries seem more important to his friends
than they deserve. He _is_ one of the giants. Think of it: he had made,
on an impulse of out and out creation, the most expressive of all
languages, so far as mere sound goes; and as if that were not enough, he
had gone ahead and composed in that language incomparable lyrics. The
meanings were in the sounds. You couldn't mistake them. Have you ever
heard a tiger roar--full steam ahead? There was one piece that began
suddenly with a kind of terrible, obsessing, strong purring that shook
the walls of the room and that went into a series of the most terrible
tiger roars and ended with the nightmare screams of a child. I have
never been so frightened in my life. And there was a snake song, a soft,
wavy, piano, _pianissimo_ effect, all malignant stealth and horror, and
running through it were the guileless and insistently hungry twitterings
of baby birds in the nest. But there were comical pieces, too, in which
ludicrous adventures befell unsophisticated monkeys; and there was a
whole series of spring-fever songs--some of them just rotten and
nervous, and some of them sad and yearning--and some of them--I don't
know just how to put it--well, some of them you might say were not
exactly fit to print. One thing he read me--it was very
short--consisted of hoarse, inarticulate, broken groans--I couldn't make
out what it meant at all. And I was very curious to know, because it
seemed to move Jonathan himself much more than anything else of his.

"'You know,' he explained to me, 'my father and mother couldn't make any
sound at all--oh, yes--they could clap their hands together and make a
sound that way--but I mean with their voices--they hadn't any
voices--sometimes their lips smacked and made a noise over eating, or