Music, it is sometimes said, is not an intellectual art. _What does this mean?_ Does it mean that music employs no intellect in the artist, and excites none in the hearer? The assertion in both cases is untrue. Music, as a study, must, I think, be profoundly intellectual. In the oldest universities it has always had a place among the abstract sciences. But, considered as an enjoyment—considered in relation to the hearer—we should first need to settle what we understand by an intellectual enjoyment. To work a problem in algebra, or to examine a question of theology, may be each an intellectual pleasure; but the pleasure, it is manifest, is, in each case very different. These both, it is true, agree in taxing the _reasoning_ faculty; but is nothing intellectual but that which formally taxes this faculty? Is nothing intellectual but that which involves syllogism—but that which implies demonstration or induction? Prayer is not intellectual, if we identify intellectuality with logic; and if we do this, it is _not_ intellectual to feel the merits of a picture, but peculiarly so to understand the proportions of its frame. According to such a theory, it is intellectual to analyze with Aristotle, but it is not so to burn and to soar with Plato. To speculate with Jeremy Bentham is intellectual, but it is not so to be enraptured by the divine song of Milton. Assertions which lead to such conclusions must be radically false. Whatever puts man’s spiritual powers into action, is intellectual. The _kind_ of action engaged will, of course, be ever according to the subject and the object. The intellectuality of a statesman is not that of a bard; the intellectuality which concocts an act of parliament, is not that which composes a “Song of the Bell.” Music is neither inductive nor raciotionative. It is an art; that is, it is an inward law realised in outward fact. Such is all art. In this music agrees with all arts, for all arts are but the outward realities of inward laws. But some of these are for utility, others for delight. Music is of those arts which spring from the desire for enjoyment and gratify it. It bears the soul away into the region of the infinite, and moves it with conceptions of exhaustless possibilities of beauty. If ideas, feelings, imaginations, are intellectual, then is music; if that which can excite, combine, modify, elevate—memories, feelings, imagination—is intellectual, then music is intellectual.