Music pays for the immense power that has been given it; it awakens more than any other art the sentiment of the infinite, because it is vague, obscure, indeterminate in its effects. It is just the opposite art to sculpture, which bears less towards the infinite, because every thing in it is fixed with the last degree of precision. Such is the force and at the same time the feebleness of music, that it expresses every thing and expresses nothing in particular. Sculpture, on the contrary, scarcely gives rise to any reverie, for it clearly represents such a thing and not such another. Music does not paint, it touches; it puts in motion imagination, not the imagination that reproduces images, but that which makes the heart beat, for it is absurd to limit imagination to the domain of images.[126] The heart, once touched, moves all the rest of our being; thus music, indirectly, and to a certain point, can recall images and ideas; but its direct and natural power is neither on the representative imagination nor intelligence, it is on the heart, and that is an advantage sufficiently beautiful. The domain of music is sentiment, but even there its power is more profound than extensive, and if it expresses certain sentiments with an incomparable force, it expresses but a very small number of them. By way of association, it can awaken them all, but directly it produces very few of them, and the simplest and the most elementary, too,--sadness and joy with their thousand shades. Ask music to express magnanimity, virtuous resolution, and other sentiments of this kind, and it will be just as incapable of doing it, as of painting a lake or a mountain. It goes about it as it can; it employs the slow, the rapid, the loud, the soft, etc., but imagination has to do the rest, and imagination does only what it pleases. The same measure reminds one of a mountain, another of the ocean; the warrior finds in it heroic inspirations, the recluse religious inspirations. Doubtless, words determine musical expression, but the merit then is in the word, not in the music; and sometimes the word stamps the music with a precision that destroys it, and deprives it of its proper effects--vagueness, obscurity, monotony, but also fulness and profundity, I was about to say infinitude. I do not in the least admit that famous definition of song:--a noted declamation. A simple declamation rightly accented is certainly preferable to stunning accompaniments; but to music must be left its character, and its defects and advantages must not be taken away from it. Especially it must not be turned aside from its object, and there must not be demanded from it what it could not give. It is not made to express complicated and factitious sentiment, nor terrestrial and vulgar sentiments. Its peculiar charm is to elevate the soul towards the infinite. It is therefore naturally allied to religion, especially to that religion of the infinite, which is at the same time the religion of the heart; it