e
translated into sound. Strictly speaking there is thus no sound until
the brain translates the message, while if the machinery of the ear be
too dull to answer to the vibration the sound simply does not exist for
us. Beyond doubt the world is full of sounds that we cannot hear and of
sights that we never see, for of the whole range of vibration our senses
permit us to garner but the veriest fragment--a few notes here of sound,
and a brief range there of sight, out of the whole vast scale of vibrant
Nature.

There are sounds which are musical, and others that are raucous and mere
noise. The difference lies in the fact that harsh sounds are compounded
of irregular vibrations, while the essence of Music is that its waves
are rhythmic and follow each other in ordered swing. Rhythm is thus the
primary manifestation of Music: but equally so it is the basic
characteristic of everything in life. We learn that in Nature there is
nothing still and inert, but that everything is in incessant motion.
There is no such thing as solid matter. The man of Science resolved
matter into atoms, and now these atoms themselves are found to be as
miniature universes. Round a central sun, termed a Proton, whirl a
number of electrons in rhythmic motion and incessant swing. And these
electrons and protons--what are they? Something in the nature of charges
of electricity, positive and negative. So where is now our
seeming-solid matter?

When this knowledge informs our outlook we see that all that lives,
moves: and even that which never seems to move, lives also in continual
rhythm and response. The eternal hills are vibrant to the eye of
science, and the very stones are pulsing with the joy of life. The
countryside sings, and there is the beat of rhythm not merely in our
hearts but in every particle of our body. Stillness is a delusion, and
immobility a fiction of the senses. Life is movement and activity, and
rigidity and stiffness come more near to what we understand as death.
Yet even in death there is no stillness, there is but a change in the
form of activity. The body is no longer alive as an organised community,
but in its individual cells: the activity is the liveliness of
decomposition. Thus all the world expresses life, and expresses it in a
rhythm in which law and order reign supreme, and in which a sweet and
sane regularity is the ordinance.

Regular rhythm involves accent. Whether or no there be any such emphasis
as a thing in it