The third notable achievement of seventeenth century composers was the emancipation of music from servitude to poetry, and the establishment of it as an independent art. In one sense this was but a natural outcome of its new qualities of harmonic and thematic definition, lacking which it could never reach independence. So long as it remained in itself vague, amorphous, inchoate, it was constrained to be but a hand-maid, to content itself with lending eloquence or atmosphere to the utterances of its sister art; but this condition of dependence, however inevitable for a time, was nevertheless unfortunate, and bound to be eventually outlived. Music is always fatally handicapped by association with words. In the first place, words impose upon it a concrete meaning immeasurably more trite, prosaic, and limited than that abstract and indefinable meaning to the heart and mind which is its proper prerogative; the expressive power of music really begins where that of poetry fails and ceases. In the second place, the limitations of all vocal music are in many ways serious. Not only are voices incapable of sounding readily and with certainty many intervals, but they are confined to a range of a little over three octaves, and to phrases short enough not to overtax the breath. Instruments are free from all these disqualifications. They produce pure tones, without words, the most celestial of artistic materials; they can sound any interval; they extend over a range of more than seven octaves, from the deep bass of the organ or contrabass to the shrill and immaterial treble of the piccolo; and the breadth of the phrases they can produce is limited not by their own mechanism, but only by the power of intellectual synthesis possessed by listeners. For all these reasons, instruments are the ideal media for producing music; and never until they supplanted voices could music reach its complete stature as a mature and self-sufficient art, leaning on no crutch, borrowing no _raison d’être_, but making by its own legitimate means its own unique effects.