"ACTION!" said the Stream. "I lay still in my mountain-cradle for a long while. It is very silent up there. Occasionally the shadow of an eagle swept across me with a wild cry; but generally, from morning till night, I knew no change save the shadows of my rocky cradle, which went round steadily with the sun, and the shadows of the clouds, which glided across me, without my ever knowing whence or whither. But the rocks and clouds are very silent. The singing-birds did not venture so high; and the insects had nothing to tempt them near me, because no honied flower-bells bent over me there—nothing but little mosses and gray lichens, and these, though very lovely, are quiet creatures, and make no stir. "I used to find it monotonous sometimes, and longed to have power to wake the hills; and I should have found it more so, had I not felt I was growing, and should flow forth to bless the fields by and by. Every drop that fell into my rocky basin I welcomed. And, at last, the spring rains came, and all my rocks sent me down little rills on every side, and the snows melted into my cup; and, at last, I rose beyond the rim of my dwelling, and was free. "Then I danced down over the hills, and sang as I went, till all the lonely places were glad with my voice; and I tinkled over the stones like bells, and crept among my cresses like fairy flutes, and dashed over the rocks and plunged into the pools with all my endless harmonies. ACTION makes me musical," said the Stream. WHAT MAKES THINGS MUSICAL? "SUFFERING!" said the Harp-strings. "We were dull lumps of silver and copper-ore in the mines; and no silence on the living, sunny earth is like the blank of voiceless ages in those dead and sunless depths. But, since then, we have passed through many fires. The hidden earth-fires underneath the mountains first moulded us, millenniums since, to ore; and then, in these last years, human hands have finished the training which makes us what we are. "We have been smelted in furnaces heated seven times, till all our dross was gone; and then we have been drawn out on the rack, and hammered and fused, and, at last, stretched on these wooden frames, and drawn tighter and tighter, until we wonder at ourselves, and at the gentle hand which strikes such rich and wondrous chords and melodies from us—from us, who were once silent lumps of ore in the silent mines. Fires and blows have done it for us. SUFFERING has made us musical," said the Harp-strings. WHAT MAKES THINGS MUSICAL?