And so through Allegri, Stradella, the Scarlattis and a thousand singers, players and composers we come to the year 1685 in which both Bach and Handel were born. Here we are fairly in the face of modern music. What then is modern music? Music at this time bounds forward in the joy of an infinitely developable principle. What is this principle? In its last analysis it is what has now come to be called Harmony, or more specially Tonality. According to the modern musical feeling when any tone is heard it is heard in its relation to some other tone which from one circumstance or another may have been taken as a basis of such relations. By a long course of putting our ears before our understanding,--a course carried on by all those early musicians whose names I have mentioned, each contributing some new relation between tones which his ear had discovered, we have finally been able to generalize these relations in such a way as to make a complete system of tonality in which every possible tone brings to our ear an impression dependent on the tone or tones in connection with which it is heard. As the Pupil at Sais ere long began to see nothing alone, so we hear nothing alone. You have only to remember that the singer now-a-days must always have the piano accompaniment in order to satisfy our demand for harmony, that we never hear any unmixed melody in set music, in order to see how completely harmony reigns in our music, instead of bare melody. We may then broadly differentiate the modern music which begins at the same time with modern science, from all precedent music, as Harmony contrasted with Melody. To this we must add the idea of instrumental harmony, of that vast extension of harmonies rendered possible by the great development of orchestral instruments whose compass greatly exceeds that of the human voice, which formerly limited all musical energy. It is tempting, here, to push the theory of personality into fanciful extremes. You have seen how the long development of melody--melody being here the individual--receives a great extension in the polyphonic music, when individual melodies move along side by side without jostling: and how at length the whole suddenly bursts into the highest type of social development, where the melody is at once united with the harmony in the most intimate way, yet never loses its individuality; where the melody would seem to maintain towards the harmony almost the ideal relation of our finite personality, to the Infinite personality; at once autonomous as finite, and yet contained in, and rapturously united with the infinite.