Yet the least part of music is the mere sensation. It is not on the ear but on the heart that its finest spirit dwells. _There_ are the living chords which it puts in motion, and in whose vibration it has the echoes of its tones. The heart, after all, is the instrument with which the true musician has to deal. He must understand that from its lowest note to the top of its compass. The true test of music is the amount of feeling it contains. The true criterion of a love for music is the capacity to appreciate feeling in music. Music properly is the language of emotion. It is the language of the heart. Its grammar, its rhetoric, its eloquence, its oratory, is of the heart. The evidence of its power is in the calm or the quivering pulsation. Feeling in music is a memory, a sympathy, or an impulse. Nothing can recall with such vividness as music can a past emotion—a departed state of mind. Words are but the history of a by-gone thought—music is its presence. All our profoundest feelings are in their nature lyrical. Whatever most deeply affects us, we do, in some way, link to tune, or they are by tune awakened. The feelings sing of themselves, and make an orchestra of the brain. Persons utterly incapable of putting the simplest combination of sounds musically together, will make melody in their hearts of the reminiscences that strongly move them. And these will commonly be sad, as all is that is connected with the Past—sad, however, with various degrees of intensity—some, but calm regrets—others, dirges and requiems. Therefore it is that the most affecting melodies belong to the Past—to the past in the life of a man—to the past in the life of a nation. Such melodies come not from prosperity or power. They come from those who have missed a history, or whose history is over. Such melodies are voices of sadness—the yearnings over what might have been but was not—the regret for what has been but will never be again. And thus, too, it is with the most affecting eloquence. That which agitates the breast with force resistless is the word which is fraught with the passions of its sorrow. Life in power is Action—Life in memory is elegy or eloquence. A nation, like a man, dreams its life again—and until life is gone or changed it soliloquizes or sings its dreams. The music of memory lives in every man’s experience; and the excellence of it is, that it binds itself only to our better feelings. It is the excellence of our nature, also, that only such feelings have spontaneous memories. The worst man does not willingly recall his bad feelings: and if he did, he could not wed them to a melody. Hatred, malice—vengeance, envy, have, to be sure, their proper expressions in the lyric drama, but of themselves they are not musical, and by themselves they could not be endured. It is not so with the kind emotions. They are in themselves a music—and memory delights in the sweetness of their intonations. Love,