vibrations waiting to be picked up by a sympathetic receiver. Yet so few
receivers, being but human after all, are sensitive enough and
sufficiently delicate in in their poise to catch the floating news: and
so the harvest is plenteous but those who garner it are few.

Perhaps Sullivan felt something of this when, in the "Prodigal Son," he
penned the simplest and yet most eloquent of melodies to the words, "O
that thou hadst hearkened to My commandments," ending up with the words,
set too simply for any but a consummate artist to sing with complete
effect,--"Turn ye, turn ye--why will ye die?" The marvel truly is that
we are already so dead, so immured and petrified in our hard
self-satisfaction, when we might so easily develop the freedom,
fluidity, and delicacy of fine response to these tenuous intimations of
our own spirituality and high destiny. Here we live, as some writer has
aptly said, on top of a gold mine, and the tragedy is that we are
ignorant of the gold. We live, and move, and have our being in an ocean
of spiritual and inspiring thought: surely our problem is to find the
conditions that will avail to put us in touch with this lively world of
inspiration in which we are accustomed to pass so dead and unresponsive
an existence.

CHAPTER V

THE CONDITIONS OF INSPIRATION

"The greatest Masterpieces in Music will be found to contain
sensuous, emotional, and rational factors, and something beside:
some divine element of life by which they are animated and
inspired"

_W. H. Hadow_

It may be interesting for a little space to consider the conditions
under which Inspiration operates, for, like any other faculty, it is
subject to the control of law. We have already emphasised the
universality of vibration and the call of like to like, but the theme
will bear some further elaboration.

We adventure into the study of sound and its laws and we find that all
sounds are propagated by means of waves. These proceed in circular
fashion, as do the ripples upon the still surface of a lake into which a
stone has been thrown. Further, these waves are of differing rates.
Middle C, on the piano, for instance, is made by waves that reach us at
the rate of about 256 per second. As sound travels roughly at 1,100
feet to the second, it is clear that the wave of this note is something
over four feet from crest to crest. The wave of a note an octave higher
would be double the rate and half the length. In addition to t