Yet in spite of all these indications of the direction in which music was moving with Beethoven, his instinct for beauty kept him from allowing mere delineation to become his ideal. As Sir Hubert Parry well says, the Pastoral Symphony is like a manifesto on that point. Of all Beethoven’s works, it ventures farthest into the domain of program music. It contains actual imitations of sounds and sights in nature, as the rippling of the brook (strings); the muttering of thunder (contrabasses in their low register); flashes of lightning (violins); the bassoon of an old peasant sitting on a barrel, and able to play but three tones; and the song of the nightingale (flute), quail (oboe), and cuckoo (clarinet.) All the movements bear descriptive titles, as follows: “The awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country; Scene by the brook; Merry gathering of peasants; Thunderstorm; Shepherd’s song--Rejoicings and thankfulness after the storm.” It is obvious that here Beethoven was pushing the descriptive power of music to its limits. Yet it is important to note that even here neither his instinctive sense of the proper uses of the musical art nor his reasoned conviction as to the nature of musical expression forsook him. Throughout the growlings of the thunder, the music pursues its way coherently and accordingly to its own laws. The rhythmic scheme and the harmonic sequence are maintained, and the general structure is not for a moment forgotten. After the imitation of the bird-notes, in the second movement, the musical sentence is rounded out to completion by the lovely concluding phrase, imitated by various instruments. (See Fig. XXIX). [Music: score] [Illustration: FIGURE XXIX. THE BIRD-NOTES IN THE PASTORAL SYMPHONY.] It is only necessary to play the bird-notes alone, omitting the supplementary phrase, to see how much of the effect is a matter of pure music. And that Beethoven realized this himself, that he was clearly aware that music affects us more by setting up vague but potent emotions in us by means of a beautiful embodiment of expressive sounds than by merely copying what is in the actual world, is evidenced by the motto he inscribes at the head of his score: “Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei”--“More the expression of feeling than painting.” Even more succinct, if that is possible, is a note in one of his sketch books: “Pastoral Symphony: no picture, but something in which the emotions are expressed which are aroused in men by the pleasure of the country.”