music originally diverged from emotional speech in a gradual,
unobtrusive manner; and this is the inference to which our argument
points. Further evidence to the same effect is supplied by Greek
history. The early poems of the Greeks--which, be it remembered, were
sacred legends embodied in that rhythmical, metaphorical language which
strong feeling excites--were not recited, but chanted: the tones and
the cadences were made musical by the same influences which made the
speech poetical.

By those who have investigated the matter, this chanting is believed to
have been not what we call singing, but nearly allied to our recitative
(far simpler indeed, if we may judge from the fact that the early Greek
lyre, which had but _four_ strings, was played in _unison_ with the
voice, which was therefore confined to four notes), and as such, much
less remote from common speech than our own singing is. For recitative,
or musical recitation, is in all respects intermediate between speech
and song. Its average effects are not so _loud_ as those of song. Its
tones are less sonorous in _timbre_ than those of song. Commonly it
diverges to a smaller extent from the middle notes--uses notes neither
so high nor so low in _pitch_. The _intervals_ habitual to it are
neither so wide nor so varied. Its _rate of variation_ is not so rapid.
And at the same time that its primary _rhythm_ is less decided, it has
none of that secondary rhythm produced by recurrence of the same or
parallel musical phrases, which is one of the marked characteristics of
song. Thus, then, we may not only infer, from the evidence furnished by
existing barbarous tribes, that the vocal music of pre-historic times
was emotional speech very slightly exalted; but we see that the earliest
vocal music of which we have any account differed much less from
emotional speech than does the vocal music of our days.

That recitative--beyond which, by the way, the Chinese and Hindoos seem
never to have advanced--grew naturally out of the modulations and
cadences of strong feeling, we have indeed still current evidence. There
are even now to be met with occasions on which strong feeling vents
itself in this form. Whoever has been present when a meeting of Quakers
was addressed by one of their preachers (whose practice it is to speak
only under the influence of religious emotion), must have been struck by
the quite unusual tones, like those of a subdued chant, in which the
address was ma