Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 07
General
Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 07
Literature -- Collections
As we are wont to argue the invisible things of God, even his eternal
power and Godhead, from the things that are seen, finding them all
images of thought and vehicles of intelligence, so we have an argument
for God more impressive, in one view, because the matter of it is
so deep and mysterious, from the fact that a grand, harmonic,
soul-interpreting law of music pervades all the objects of the material
creation, and that things without life, all metals and woods and valleys
and mountains and waters, are tempered with distinctions of sound, and
toned to be a language to the feeling of the heart. It is as if God had
made the world about us to be a grand organ of music, so that our
feelings might have play in it, as our understanding has in the light of
the sun and the outward colors and forms of things. What is called the
musical scale, or octave, is fixed in the original appointments of sound
just as absolutely and definitely as the colors of the rainbow or prism
in the optical properties and laws of light. And the visible objects of
the world are not more certainly shaped and colored to us under the
exact laws of light and the prism, than they are tempered and toned, as
objects audible, to give distinctions of sound by their vibrations in
the terms of the musical octave. It is not simply that we hear the sea
roar and the floods clap their hands in anthems of joy; it is not that
we hear the low winds sigh, or the storms howl dolefully, or the ripples
break peacefully on the shore, or the waters dripping sadly from the
rock, or the thunders crashing in horrible majesty through the pavements
of heaven; not only do all the natural sounds we hear come to us in
tones of music as interpreters of feeling, but there is hid in the
secret temper and substance of all matter a silent music, that only
waits to sound and become a voice of utterance to the otherwise
unutterable feeling of our heart--a voice, if we will have it, of love
and worship to the God of all.
First, there is a musical scale in the laws of the air itself, exactly
answering to the musical sense or law of the soul. Next, there is in all
substances a temperament of quality related to both; so that whatever
kind of feeling there may be in a soul--war and defiance, festivity and
joy, sad remembrance, remorse, pity, penitence, self-denial, love,
adoration--may find some fit medium of sound in which to express itself.
And, what is not less remarkable, connected with all these forms of
substances there are mathematical laws of length and breadth, or
definite proportions of each, and reflective angles, that are every way
as exact as those which regulate the colors of the prism, the images of
the mirror, or the telescopic light of astronomic worlds--mathematics
for the heart as truly as for the head.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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