"This is the neck." A bandeau locates his "forehead." A bracelet indicates the "arm." Is the sculpture thus significant? Hardly more does our music yet signify to us. You hear an unfamiliar air. You like it or dislike it, or are indifferent. You can tell that it is slow and plaintive, or brisk and lively, or perhaps even that it is defiant or stirring; but how insensible you are to the delicate shades of its meaning! How hidden is the song in the heart of the composer till he gives you the key! You hear as though you heard not. You hear the thunder, and the cataract, and the crash of the avalanche; but the song of the nightingale, the chirp of the katydid, the murmur of the waterfall never reach you. This cannot be the ultimatum. Music must hold in its own bosom its own interpretation, and man must have in his its corresponding susceptibilities. Music is language, and language implies a people who employ and understand it. But music, even by its professor, is as yet faintly understood. Its meanings go on crutches. They must be helped out by words. What does this piece say to you? Interpret it. You cannot. You must be taught much before you can know all. It must be translated from music into speech before you can entirely assimilate it. Musicians do not trust alone to notes for moods. Their light shines only through a glass darkly. But in some other sphere, in some happier time, in a world where gross wants shall have disappeared, and therefore the grossness of words shall be no longer necessary, where hunger and thirst and cold and care and passion have no more admittance, and only love and faith and hope and admiration and aspiration, shall crave utterance, in that blessed unseen world shall not music be the everyday speech, conveying meaning not only with a sweetness, but with an accuracy, delicacy, and distinctness, of which we have now but a faint conception? Here words are not only rough, but ambiguous. There harmonies shall be minutely intelligible. Speak with what directness we can, be as explanatory, emphatic, illustrative as we may, there are mistakes, misunderstandings, many and grievous, and consequent missteps and catastrophes. But in that other world language shall be exactly coexistent with life; music shall be precisely adequate to meaning. There shall be no hidden corners, no bungling incompatibilities, but the searching sound penetrates into the secret sources of the soul, all-pervading. Not a nook, not a crevice, no maze so intricate, but the sound floats in to gather up fragrant aroma, to bear it yonder to another waiting soul, and deposit it as deftly by unerring magnetisms in the corresponding clefts.