on.
The idealization of the sensuous, music brings about by negating space.
In music the indifferent extension of space whose appearance painting
admits and consciously imitates is concentrated and idealized into a
single point. But in the form of a motion and tremor of the material
body within itself, this single point becomes a concrete and active
process within the idealization of matter. Such an incipient ideality of
matter which no longer appears under the spatial form, but as temporal
ideality, is sound the sensuous acknowledged as ideal, whose abstract
visibility is transformed into audibility. Sound, as it were, exempts
the ideal from its absorption in matter.

This earliest animation and inspiration of matter furnishes the medium
for the inner and intimate life of the spirit, as yet on an indefinite
level; it is through the tones of music that the heart pours out its
whole scale of feelings and passions. Thus as sculpture constitutes the
central point between architecture and the arts of romantic
subjectivity, so music forms the centre of the romantic arts, and
represents the point of transition between abstract spatial
sensuousness, which belongs to painting, and the abstract spirituality
of poetry. Within itself music has, like architecture, an abstract
quantitative relation, as a contrast to its inward and emotional
quality; it also has as its basis a permanent law to which the tones
with their combinations and successions must conform.

POETRY

For the third and most spiritual expression of the romantic form of art,
we must look to poetry. Its characteristic peculiarity lies in the power
with which it subjugates to the mind and to its ideas the sensuous
element from which music and painting began to set art free. For sound,
the one external medium of which poetry avails itself, is in it no
longer a feeling of the tone itself, but is a sign which is, by itself,
meaningless. This sign, moreover, is a sign of an idea which has become
concrete, and not merely of indefinite feeling and of its _nuances_ and
grades. By this means the tone becomes the _word_, an articulate voice,
whose function it is to indicate thoughts and ideas. The negative point
to which music had advanced now reveals itself in poetry as the
completely concrete point, as the spirit or the self-consciousness of
the individual, which spontaneously unites the infinite space of its
ideas with the time-element of sound. But this sensuous eleme