indred chords in them, opening, in harmonious echoes, that marvellous
kingdom from whence those tones come darting, like beams of light? To
set to work to make music by means of valves, springs, levers,
cylinders, or whatever other apparatus you choose to employ, is a
senseless attempt to make the means to an end accomplish what can
result only when those means are animated and, in their minutest
movements, controlled by the mind, the soul, and the heart. The gravest
reproach you can make to a musician is that he plays without
expression; because, by so doing, he is marring the whole essence of
the matter. Yet the coldest and most unfeeling executant will always be
far in advance of the most perfect of machines. For it is impossible
that no impulse whatever, from the inner man shall ever, even for a
moment, animate his rendering; whereas, in the case of a machine, no
such impulse can ever do so. The attempts of mechanicians to imitate,
with more or less approximation to accuracy, the human organs in the
production of musical sounds, or to substitute mechanical appliances
for those organs, I consider tantamount to a declaration of war against
the spiritual element in music; but the greater the forces they array
against it, the more victorious it is. For this very reason, the more
perfect that this sort of machinery is, the more I disapprove of it;
and I infinitely prefer the commonest barrel-organ, in which the
mechanism attempts nothing but to be mechanical, to Vaucauson's
flute-player, or the harmonica girl.

"'"I entirely agree with you," said Ferdinand, "and indeed you have
merely put into words what I have always thought; and I was much struck
with it to-day at the Professor's. Although I do not so wholly live and
move and have my being in music as you do, and consequently am not so
sensitively alive to imperfections in it, I, too, have always felt a
repugnance to the stiffness and lifelessness of machine-music; and, I
can remember, when I was a child at home, how I detested a large,
ordinary musical clock, which played its little tune every hour. It is
a pity that those skilful mechanicians do not try to apply their
knowledge to the improvement of musical instruments, rather than to
puerilities of this sort."

"'"Exactly," said Lewis. "Now, in the case of instruments of the
keyboard class a great deal might be done. There is a wide field open
in that direction to clever mechanical people, much as has been
accompl