thermometer
of its physical sensitiveness and its moral sentiments; and the reason
of this is evident. The shepherd tending his flock, the fisherman
mending his nets, the soldier on the march, the peasant at the plough,
has no inducement to sing unless his heart's emotion incite him to it. A
true national music is, then, what the Germans call _Volksmusik_, and,
springing from the hearts of the people, it is psychologically one of
their best interpreters. For this reason the composers of national
melodies are seldom known to fame. A national song composes itself: the
musician's lyre is the musician's heart, and from the sorrow, triumph
and travail of life comes the child of song.

The assertion, then, that music is a universal language is only half
true: it has a great variety of dialects; and it is this very
sensitiveness to human influence which makes it so universally eloquent.
Let us turn first to the East, for it still retains its primitive music,
and at this very hour some muezzin is calling from his minaret or some
Jew intoning his Talmud in the same musical cadence with which Syrian
maidens sang the hymns to Cybele.

All Oriental music is distinguished by a pathetic, long--drawn, wailing
monotony quite in keeping with the stationary and contemplative
character of the people. We are struck at once with its frequent
repetitions of one note and its short and cautious transitions, the
intervals rarely being greater than a half, or at most a full, note. The
conclusion of a measure is generally a descent, and the commencement of
a new one seems to be a feeble effort to rise from the dreamy apathy in
which Eastern imagination delights; but it is immediately followed by
the fall of the rhythmus, re-establishing its languid repose. The
frequent use of half notes induces a predominance of the minor key, and
this, with the constant recurrence of the rhythmical fall, imparts to
Semitic and Hindoo music that melancholy, lethargic uniformity which
expresses in a striking manner the benumbed energies and undeveloped
spirit of the people among whom it is found. When a race has substituted
habit and custom for national feeling, its music is necessarily
monotonous and characterless, for the stronger the national feeling of
any people, the more intense, vivid and pronounced will be its music.

Hindoo music is almost untranslatable to Western ears, but Sir W. Jones,
in an essay on the musical modes of the Hindoos--to be found in t