But my plea that music should be made easy of access for men is based chiefly on the fact that they need it. It is so easy for human beings--men or women--to become completely submerged in the details of life; and the round of daily acts and daily associations does, in course of time, completely engulf many people, so that they only catch glimpses of something beyond--glimpses of a promised land into which they never enter. I can conceive almost any business as being interesting in itself; the “game” of life has its own rewards; and there is no trade, no profession, no business that does not offer some play to the imagination. But every weight needs a counterbalance, and every human being whose daily occupation is full of practical detail must save himself or herself by some _equal force_ in the opposite direction. The law is as old as life itself. The best preparation for an education in engineering is a course in the classics, and the man who grinds all things in the mill of business eventually goes into the hopper himself. But love of beauty is a secret and inviolate thing. Our tendency to-day is to seek our salvation--of whatever kind--in the crowd. We form literary and musical clubs, and drama leagues, and art circles to accomplish what each person should do alone. This is an old human fallacy. To attempt to be literary or artistic or socialistic or religious by means of an organization is to waive the whole question. There is only one way of being literary and that is to love good literature and to read it in privacy; there is only one way to understand the drama and that is to read by yourself the great plays from Æschylus onward, and to see as many good plays as possible. I know that it is impossible to hear the symphonies of Beethoven except with some thousands of other people; nevertheless, you are yourself alone, and, by yourself, you must solve the mystery. Never can there be a more complete isolation of the individual than when, sitting with the crowd, a piece of fine music begins. Never is your own individuality so precious to you as then. Straight to your soul come these sounds, automatically separating all the diviner part of you from the lower, singling out what is commonly inarticulate and inchoate, and fanning into life again that smothered spark which never wholly dies. How impossible it is to look at pictures with other people. The mind and the imagination demand freedom to wander at will, to ponder, to speculate. What passes from the picture to you, and from you to the picture, is a sort of trembling recognition, too delicate to be shared, too intimate to be uttered. So it is with books. You need silence and retirement so as to feel the perspective of knowledge, so that your mind may wander through whatever courses open to it.