an air, a movement; it cannot "feel" a symphony, it can only perceive the relation of keys and harmonies therein. With repeated hearing, study, experience, this span of beauty may be indefinitely extended--in the individual, as in the race. But no one will deny that the direct experience of beauty, the single aesthetic thrill, is measured exactly by the length of this span. It is only genius--hearer or composer--who can operate "a longue haleine." So it is that we must understand the development in musical form from the cut and dried sonata form to the wayward yet infinitely greater beauty of Beethoven; and thence to the "free forms" of modern music. "Infinite melody" is a contradiction in terms, because when the first term cannot be present in consciousness with the last there is nothing to control and direct the progression; and our musical memory is limited. Yet we can conceive, theoretically, the possibility of an indefinite widening of the memory. It was on some such grounds as these that Poe laid down his famous "Poetic Principle,"--that a long poem does not exist; that "a long poem" is simply a flat contradiction in terms. He says, indeed, that because "elevating excitement," the end of a poem, is "through a psychical necessity" transient, therefore no poem should be longer than the natural term of such excitement. It is clearly possible to substitute for "elevating excitement," immediate musical feeling of the individual. What is the meaning of "feeling," "impression," here? It is the power of entering into a Gestaltsqualitat-- a motor group, a scheme in which every element is the mechanical cue to the following. Beauty ceases for the hearer where this carrying power, the "funded capital" of tone- linkings ceases. In just the same way, if rhythm were a perception rather than an impression, we ought to be able to apprehend a rhythm of which the unit periods were hours. Yet we may so bridge over the moments of beauty in experience that we are enabled, without stretching to a breaking-point, to speak of a symphony or an opera as a single beautiful work of art. VII