Music, then, without words, appeals rather to our animal feelings than to our reason or mind; music, with suitable words, appeals both to our animal feelings and our mind; and music, with merely recollected words, does the same by concatenation of ideas; and this also is often the result of tones, passages, and cadences, to which we have never heard words applied; hence, we talk of a lively air, a merry air, a martial air, a melancholy air; and hence a great poet wrote--
"That strain again! it had a dying fall. Oh! it came o'er my ear like the sweet south, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour."
Some airs, again, are solemn, and tend to fill the mind with awe, or a feeling of devotion; deep strains of melody were those which resounded through the great temple, when the holy psalms of the shepherd-king were chanted, and deeply was every heart moved to the worship and adoration of the living God. Oh, such should ever be our sacred music! Perhaps we are wrong, but we confess that the sweetest air composed for an ordinary song, (however pure, elegant, or patriotic that song may be,) when introduced into the house of God grates upon our feelings. We divide literature into profane and sacred (meaning nothing offensive by the term profane)--let, then, music be as strictly divided, so that the association of ideas which a popular air will, in spite of ourselves, engender, shall not creep in to intertwine with the sacred exercise of praise and thanksgiving to our Creator and Redeemer, which alone should engage the full force of our mind.
The power of music in elevating the mind, in cheering it, or, on the contrary, in depressing it, has been felt from the earliest ages. When Saul was troubled in spirit, "David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him."[16]
We have said, that animals appeal to each other through the organs of hearing by cries or sounds, nor is man destitute of natural cries, which are universally understood--the shout of exultation, the scream of terror, the shriek of agony, the moaning of mental or bodily suffering, and the sobs of sorrow, speak to every heart. But, besides these instinctive tones, man acquires a definite language, more or less extensive, more or less capable of expressing abstract or complex ideas, and ever in these points bearing progress with the advancement of the arts, with the civilization and with the religion of the people. There are some savage tribes who cannot count a hundred, but we can count to hundreds of millions, till the mind becomes overwhelmed with the vastness of the numerical progression, which, let each unit stand for a million of years, would, after all, infringe not on eternity. Language is the appeal of definite sounds, through the organs of hearing, to the mind; these sounds are arbitrary; they do not in any way represent things, or the qualities, or the state of things; for, indeed, language is based altogether on a system of association--it has to be acquired; that is, the mind has to be taught to associate certain sounds with certain mental perceptions; but these sounds do not mean the same thing in every language or dialect. On this point we need not insist, neither need we give examples, which must suggest themselves to every reader, if he reflects that there are other tongues beside that which he speaks.