Nor are mouths, eyes, and lungs by any means the only organs through which influences arrive at our brain, modifying the thoughts which proceed from them. The sense of Smelling, when gratified by the odors of woods and gardens and hay-fields, or even of delicately perfumed rooms, lifts all our thoughts into a region wherein the Beautiful, the Tender, and the Sublime may impress us freely; while the same sense, offended by disgusting and noxious odors, as of coarse cookery, open sewers, or close chambers inhabited by vulgar people, thrusts us down into an opposite stratum of feeling, wherein poetry entereth not, and our very thoughts smell of garlic. Needless to add that in a still more transcendent way Music seizes on the thoughts of the musically-minded, and bears them off in its talons over sea and land, and up to Olympus like Ganymede. Two easily distinguishable mental influences seem to belong to music, according as it is heard by those who really appreciate it or by others who are unable to do so. To the former it opens a book of poetry, which they follow word for word after the performer, as if he read it to them, thinking the thoughts of the composer in succession with scarcely greater uncertainty or vagueness than if they were expressed in verbal language of a slightly mystical description. To the latter the book is closed; but though the listener’s own thoughts unroll themselves uninterrupted by the composer’s ideas, they are very considerably colored thereby. “I delight in music,” said once Sir Charles Lyell to me: “I am always able to think out my work better while it is going on!” As a matter of fact, he resumed at the moment a disquisition concerning the date of the Glacial Period at the precise point at which it had been interrupted by the performance of a symphony of Beethoven, having evidently mastered in the interval an intricate astronomical knot. To ordinary mortals with similar deficiency of musical sense, harmonious sound seems to spread a halo like that of light, causing every subject of contemplation to seem glorified, as a landscape appears in a dewy sunrise. Memories rise to the mind and seem infinitely more affecting than at other times, affections still living grow doubly tender, new beauties appear in the picture or the landscape before our eyes, and passages of remembered prose or poetry float through our brains in majestic cadence. In a word, the sense of the Beautiful, the Tender, the Sublime, is vividly aroused, and the atmosphere of familiarity and commonplace, wherewith the real beauty and sweetness of life are too often veiled, is lifted for the hour. As in a camera-obscura or mirror, the very trees and grass which we had looked on a thousand times are seen to possess unexpected loveliness. But all this can only happen to the non-musical soul when the harmony to which it listens is really harmonious, and when it comes at an appropriate time, when the surrounding conditions permit and incline the man to