Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared;

Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow;
For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared,
That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go.

Never to be again! But many more of the kind

As good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me?

To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mind

To the same, same self, same love, same God: ay, what was, shall be.

Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?
Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!

What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?

Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more:
On earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist, —
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.

And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence

For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized? Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence ? Why rushed the discords in but that harmony should be prized?

Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear;

Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe :

But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;

The rest may reason and welcome: 't is we musicians know.

Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign :
I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,
Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor, — yes,
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,
Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep;
Which, hark! I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,
The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.

Robert Browning

II.

ASSIMILATION, OR DRAMATIC RELATIONS.

XXVI. IDEAS AND EXPERIENCE.

ADEQUATE expression implies the presentation of ideas, thought, relations, and experience; words are the symbols which form the medium of communication, and if they are not understood, there can be little communication of thought. But ideas must be represented, and a correspondence brought about between the conceptions in the mind of the speaker and those in the mind of the hearer. Conceptions alone, however vivid, do not result in perfect expression: they must be presented in such a way as to form a natural and logical sequence. Expression, however, may still be imperfect, as thought may be cold, abstract, and formal, and awaken little or no response. True expression must not only communicate thought, but awaken dispositions favorable or unfavorable to its reception. Thus, the ideal relations of conceptions must be given as well as their logical relations. Each conception must be presented as part of a situation, and each thought with a background. Something more than mere thinking is needed: the imagination and the artistic nature must be awakened.

Even this is not all. Expression must manifest the man himself. It must not only clearly convey his ideas and thoughts; it must show his feelings, his earnest convictions, his interest in relation to the thoughts he utters. Every thought, according to some psychologists, has a co-ordinate response in feeling, which is an essential part of it, and which must not be separated from it in true expression. Where thought is separated from emotion, the voice will be cold and hard, and the expression neutral.

The utterance of words forms the mechanical part of vocal expression. It will be discussed under vocal training.

Conceptions in relation to vocal expression have already been considered; also the logical relations of ideas, and the imagination, or the ideal relations of ideas.

The next step in our discussion is the study of the various degrees and modes of assimilation, and the response to thought, or the effect of thinking upon feeling, the conditions of experience, and its relations to expression,-in other words, the dramatic relations of ideas.

Robert of Sicily.

NEXT morning, waking with the day's first beam,
He said within himself, "It was a dream!"
But the straw rustled as he turned his head,
There were the cap and bells beside his bed,
Around him rose the bare, discolored walls,
Close by, the steeds were champing in their stalls,
And in the corner, a revolting shape,
Shivering and chattering sat the wretched ape.
It was no dream; the world he loved so much
Had turned to dust and ashes at his touch!

Longfellow.

In these lines of Longfellow we find not only successive ideas in a logical sequence, not merely imaginative conceptions of the whole situation, and of every object or scene in succession, elements which have been explained, but something more. The reader, thoroughly imbued with the imaginative situation, identifies himself with each mental act. Each event occurs in natural order; the reader shares King Robert's bewilderment on waking up, his vague understanding of what has happened, his gradual realization of the truth. He hears the "straw rustle," discovers the "cap and bells," the "bare discolored walls," "the steeds;' feels dismay as he observes in the corner "the wretched ape.' Then follows the full realization of all, —“it was no dream." The words, the pictures, the thought, the situations, or the feelings alone are inadequate; it is their harmonious union that produces perfect expression. Words are only symbols of ideas, and when given as mere objects of attention in themselves are not a means of expression. A single conception may be so isolated as to hinder thought; for thought is a comparison of ideas, and requires continuity. With the revelation of ideas in sequence,

expression really begins, because a corresponding current of ideas can be thus awakened in another mind. But this is not all that is required for complete expression. Expression, to tell the whole truth, must show the sympathy of the thinking mind; must reveal the relation of the speaker to truth, his belief in it, or antagonism to it, in short, his point of view, his mental attitude, and the degree and character of his assimilation.

To give a thought as such merely for the sake of thought may not only destroy interest in it, but neutralize and even pervert the truth it contains. Experience is a part of truth; or, at the very least, a realization of it.

A wide difference exists between fact and truth. Truth is found only in the relationship and unity of facts, or in the union of fact with experience. The real truth in a poem, essay, or speech consists not in mere facts, but in feeling and sympathy. What is the real truth of the Twenty-third Psalm? A mere neutral statement of its facts, however clear, cannot give its spirit.

If nothing is perceived but abstract ideas, the result is commonplace prose; the real spirit and soul are lost.

Experience gives definiteness of character; it implies the wisdom of an expert. The word etymologically implies going through and coming out of something. Accordingly, experience is the result of passing through and coming out of certain situations. Thus, experience in life develops character; the lack of the development of character is almost synonymous with lack of experience. Experience places a definite mark upon personality. The word "character " comes from the Greek, and means mark. In its highest sense it is applied only to a human being; but it may be taken in an objective sense, and applied to everything. In Nature, every pebble, every stone, every tree, every leaf, has its character. Each has passed through a specific and definite experience, and received a peculiar mark. There is no monotony except in death. A machine may make a million buttons or pins alike, but whatever is a part of Nature has a distinct and definite character.

All this applies especially to vocal expression. Each idea, each situation, each picture or thought, when properly conceived and

assimilated, gives a specific and definite mark to every phrase, every word, every tone used in expressing it. Thus, a phrase, to have character, must have a manifestation, not of the thought only, but of the experience of the soul that thinks it. Expression has character in proportion to the union of thought with its associated experience.

Monotony is the death of all true feeling and discrimination, and since all thinking starts in discrimination, if there is no difference suggested, there will be little thought awakened in speaker or hearer.

The cause of monotony is not invariably, however, a lack of thought. It is frequently due to a lack of sympathy with the thought. Many persons are taught to conceal feeling, to render everything upon a neutral plane, or without any sympathetic relationship. Enthusiasm is not desirable in society; conventionality tends to repress experience; so men give thought merely for thought, without assimilation of its spirit. Many seem to think it egotistic to give conceptions and experience at the same time. There is a certain form of self-styled culture, which consists in an assumed indifference to everything in life, pretending to occupy a plane too high and exalted to be concerned with the ordinary events of existence. But this is not natural, and it is death to all artistic power.

Every child utters not only its thoughts but its experience in a perfectly frank way. Neutrality is unnatural, and is the result of false education, of repression and conventionality. There is a natural instinct in the human heart to identify itself with the truth.

We come, therefore, to an important step in expression,- the presentation of the truth by manifesting the whole personality: the development of the natural power to identify himself with the situation about which he speaks; to reveal in expression his point of view, and his relations to the truth; to bring into harmony the natural witnesses to the truth, so that all expression may be the telling of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and to secure that assimilation which is the fundamental requisite of all effective oratory, which is not only the soul of histrionic expression and reading, but of speaking, the mani