Now the whole point of our inquiry is this--what was the creative or directing mind that brought these things to be? It was not the bard who first chanted the song; it was no one of the thousands of singers who modified and modified it as they passed it on, until presently the fixed tune was evolved, and changes and modifications ceased. These were all instruments in its evolution; but there was also an evolver. For it was brought, if indeed it is a primeval and radical thing, to no haphazard conclusion. The music that you make up is one thing; the music of the spheres is another: though it might happen indeed, that sitting down to compose, there should be revealed to you a measure from the music of the spheres. No doubt that would have happened occasionally--probably only occasionally--with the great transcendent geniuses of music: but then, there was no great transcendent genius, neither Wagner nor Bach nor Beethoven, concerned in the making of the folk-tune. We can posit the soul of Beethoven, wrapt up into the universal soul, hearing immortal immeasurable things, and after, producing some fragment of them in a sonata or a symphony! But what soul was it here, who heard the rhythm and measure of the star-music, and what the mountains are singing in their hearts to make them eternal, and the song that drives the rivers and the rain, and the bardic carol of the sun, and the ineffable yearning of the souls of men, upward towards their divinity and evolutionary destined grandeur--who heard, and set all these things bleakly and magnificently down in the folk-song? I will not apologize for speaking of the folk-song and the sonata in one breath: of the gods also are the mountain and the pansy. Do we not see here the working of a Soul greater than that of any individual; the soul of the nation; the God that is this people or that? His compositions are marked by a unity, as are those of any composer: you can tell an Irish Air at a hearing, or a Welsh Air. And He, or It, reveals through them greater and deeper things than are known to any individual among his people; ancient memories that _they_ may have wholly forgotten; aspirations after spiritual glories which not one of them may have ever foreseen or hoped for. So all the deepest things that are in the national consciousness may be poured through the playing of these composerless compositions; and we cannot doubt that they remain a most potent link between the people and its hidden divinity. LAPLAND: by P. F.