“I have already hinted the grounds of my argument to you. It is my belief that life is its own end, and needs no justification. It is also my belief that each individual soul is a microcosm self-sufficient, and its own excuse for being. Each day as I wrought, I came to be more and more possessed with that truth, it came to be more and more self-evident and final; until at last there came a day when I would not have hailed a ship had I seen one—when the life that loomed up before me within my own heart was a thing of so much interest that the rest of the world was nothing in comparison. “At first I had felt just as you feel now—I had been interested in food and clothing and light, and what not else; but in the end I found myself behaving as a soldier upon a long campaign—I strewed my path with the things that had once been necessities, and that now were encumbrances. It proved thus with my violin—strings or no strings; the music that throbbed in my soul and swept me away into the far spaces of my being—it was no longer to be limited and restrained by what human fingers could achieve. It was as if I had once plodded upon the land and now discovered wings. When the vision came to me, I no longer toiled for weeks to shape it and record it—I went on where the new light shone, where the new hope beckoned; and so, day after day, toward things with which it is not easy for words to deal.” My brother paused for a while; I did not speak. “When I try to talk to you of these things,” he said at last, “I do not know where I stand. I find myself thinking of the brother I remember—who was content to call himself a materialist. You ask me what was this life that I speak of—was it thought, was it motion, was it will? It was all, I think; always it involved contemplation, the beholding of a universe of being, and the comprehending of it as an utterance of power; and always it was emotion, the flooding of one’s being with an oceantide of joy and exultation; and always it was will—it was the concentration of all the powers of one’s soul in one colossal effort. But chiefest of all, I think—and what is hardest even to hint at—it was the fourth, and the highest of the faculties of the mind—it was imagination. “It is endless—that is the first thing that a man learns about it—it is the very presence of the infinite. And also he learns that it is at his command—that it is no accident, but his being itself; that he has but to call, and it comes; that he has but to knock, and it is opened unto him. It is that for which pilgrims and crusaders have fought, which prophets and saints have sung. And it is that, of course, which is the life of music. Music lies nearest to this mystery; to him who understands, it is the living presence of the spirit. Its movement is the building up of that ecstasy, its complexity is the infiniteness of that vision—all the fulness and the wonder and the glory of it are there.”