se and conception of our passions, incontinent in the
utterance of them, feeble of perseverance in them, sullied or shameful in
the indulgence of them, their expression by musical sound becomes broken,
mean, fatuitous, and at last impossible; the measured waves of the air of
heaven will not lend themselves to expression of ultimate vice, it must
be forever sunk into discordance or silence. And since, as before
stated, every work of right art has a tendency to reproduce the ethical
state which first developed it, this, which of all the arts is most
directly in power of discipline; the first, the simplest, the most
effective of all instruments of moral instruction; while in the failure
and betrayal of its functions, it becomes the subtlest aid of moral
degradation. Music is thus, in her health, the teacher of perfect order,
and is the voice of the obedience of angels, and the companion of the
course of the spheres of heaven; and in her depravity she is also the
teacher of perfect disorder and disobedience, and the Gloria in Excelsis
becomes the Marseillaise. In the third section of this volume, I reprint
two chapters from another essay of mine ("The Cestus of Aglaia"), on
modesty or measure, and on liberty, containing further reference to music
in her two powers; and I do this now, because, among the many monstrous
and misbegotten fantasies which are the spawn of modern license, perhaps
the most impishly opposite to the truth is the conception of music which
has rendered possible the writing, by educated persons, and, more
strangely yet, the tolerant criticism, of such words as these: "This so
persuasive art is the only one that has no didactic efficacy, that
engenders no emotions save such as are without issue on the side of moral
truth, that expresses nothing of God, nothing of reason, nothing of human
liberty." I will not give the author's name; the passage is quoted in
the "Westminster Review" for last January [1869].

43. I must also anticipate something of what I have to say respecting
the relation of the power of Athena to organic life, so far as to note
that her name, Pallas, probably refers to the quivering or vibration of
the air; and to its power, whether as vital force, or communicated wave,
over every kind of matter, in giving it vibratory movement; first, and
most intense, in the voice and throat of the bird, which is the air
incarnate; and so descending through the various orders of animal life to
the v