The relation between music and life is, then, an intimate and vital relation. Any person, young or old, who does not sing and to whom music has no meaning, is by just so much a poorer person in all that goes to make life happy, joyous, and significant. Any community which employs no form of musical expression is by just so much inarticulate and disorganized as a community. Any church that buys its music and never produces any of its own loses just so much in spiritual power. We all need music because it is a fluent, free, and beautiful form of expression for those deeper impulses of ours which are denied expression by words. Our speech is too highly specialized; we discriminate with words instead of with inflections and gestures; we smother our natural expressiveness; we hold words to be synonyms of thought, whereas thought is half feeling and instinct and imagination, no one of which can really find issue in exact terms. All great literature is inexact. Music frees us. Not only does it let each of us say for himself what he cannot say in words, but, at its best, it reveals to us a higher reach of life, detached, yet a part of the inmost being of us all. When we truly respond to it, there is set up in us a certain harmonious vibration which tunes us to one another, to the mother earth, the everlasting sea, and to that larger world of suns, stars, and planets of which they are a part. Nothing ever dies. What we call death is only a transformation from one form of life to another. All the music that ever was still sounds; all the music that is to be still slumbers. Life and death are one, and, in the truest sense, the whole universe is a song. THE END FOOTNOTE: [13] I do not mean a phonographic record of the tenor solo in “L’Elisir d’Amore,” or anything of that sort. I mean something which will be more than a casual moment’s entertainment. The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A