cause in the very effort he makes to compose, he is enriching his own life. No one can compose music without benefiting his own nature, without getting a more beautiful outlook on life, if he is honest in his efforts and tries to do the very best he is capable of doing. The composer may only hope to give beautiful and soul-satisfying music when he draws it from the depths of his highest consciousness. No matter how much he may study the works of other composers, no matter to what degree he may have developed form, he must have the musical consciousness in order to make music. The imitator or the plagiarist can never produce music worthy of the name. He stands in the same relation to a real composer that an iron or a brazen bell does to a silver or a golden one; and yet the world is full of people who are so unattuned, so discordant in mind that they prefer that which is hardly the semblance of music or poetic beauty to that which is both real and beautiful! Sudermann has said: "The greatest and highest thing one possesses in the world is his life's melody—a certain strain that ever vibrates, that his soul forever sings, waking or dreaming, loudly or softly, internally or externally. Others may say his temperament or his character is so and so. He only smiles, for he knows his melody and he knows it alone." What each person needs is to find his own melody, and not only to find it, but to let it sing hour by hour in his every-day life. Through doing this, he will find that he is making progress, that his melody is bringing to him not only the real satisfaction of his present life, but is preparing the way for a still higher life.

Haydn was once asked which he liked the better of his two oratorios, the "Seasons" or the "Creation."

He said the "Creation," because in the "Creation" angels speak, and their talk is of God. The great Handel completed the score of the "Messiah" in fourteen days. Speaking to someone of the "Hallelujah Chorus," he said: "I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the feet of God Himself." It is said. of him, also, that his tears mingled with the ink as he penned the notes. Said Helmholtz: "Just as in the rolling ocean, the movement, rhythmically repeated, and yet ever-varying, rivets our attention and hurries us along. But whereas in the sea blind physical forces alone are at work, and hence the final impression on the spectator's mind is nothing but solitude-in a musical work of art the movement follows the outflow of the artist's own emotions. Now gently. gliding, now gracefully leaping, now violently stirred, penetrated, or laboriously contending with the natural expression of passion, the stream of sound, in primitive vivacity, bears over into the hearer's soul unimagined moods which the artist has overheard from his own, and finally raises up to that repose of everlasting beauty of which God has allowed but few of His elect favourites to be the heralds.”

The greatest composers of music lived to express the full passion, power, and beauty of music, often losing all thought of the self and becoming so absorbed by the consciousness of music that space and time were entirely forgotten. It was thus that they produced their greatest works and by their music helped the whole world to a better understanding and a truer conception of what life should be. And in the doing of this, they had their compensation, although on the face of it, it might seem that all the physical poverty and hardships they endured, and the mental anguish

and sorrow they passed through would make it appear that life gave them little in the way of compensation. But while the world for which they worked gave but little in return, they were not without the real satisfaction and joys of living; for all creative work brings with it its own reward. When heart and mind and hands are all engaged in an effort to produce something new or something beautiful, then to the person thus engaged comes the sense of exaltation wherein he rises above the world and the things of the world. For the time being he is in a new world; he has lost all consciousness of the past, and is living in the wonder and beauty of the eternal present.

"There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentler on the spirit lies,

Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes;

Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies. Here are cool mosses deep

And thro' the moss the ivies creep,

And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,

And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep."

Were it not for this power to penetrate, as it were, into the invisible and realize the wonder and ecstasy of a higher consciousness, it would not have been possible for a great composer to exist and produce really beautiful, soul-satisfying music, in a world constituted as it is to-day, or even in a world of the past. For the everyday world of man's life is so filled with the things that do not count, the dull, dead materialism and the constant grind of the body of humanity in order to maintain a purely physical existence, that all spiritual vision is entirely shut out, or at least, largely ob

scured. The composer, therefore, finds it necessary to leave the every-day consciousness and enter, as it were, a new world, one filled with music and colour, and with this his whole life becomes inspired, and because of his new vision there are set up in his mind new ideals to be expressed through musical tones. The composer who can fully realise the truth of this and who uses his divine power to express the eternal love and joy of life, becomes a true saviour of the world to lead man out of the thraldom and bondage of material thought and desire, and cause him to realise not only his kinship to God, but his true relation to his fellow-men; and the composer who through his life-giving music shall awaken the love of God and of man in the breasts of his fellow-men, shall rank with the greatest prophets of all time, a divinely inspired prophet with a divinely inspired message of peace and good-will to all men.

CHAPTER XIV

LIFE'S LOVE MELODY

"Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands;

Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords

with might;

Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, past in music out of

sight.

"Music that is born of human breath

Comes straighter to the soul than any strain
The hand alone can make."

"A tone

Of some world far from ours,

-TENNYSON.

Where music, and moonlight, and feeling are one."

"Feeling and music move together,
Like a swan and shadow ever

Floating on a sky-blue river
In a day of cloudless weather."

-MORRIS.

-SWINBURNE.

-LOWELL.

MUSIC, like everything that is fundamental in life, partakes of the heart or feeling, of the mind or thought, of the sense or physical expression, and can never be of any one plane of being, but ever must embody all three. We might go farther and say that there are four great planes of being, or states of consciousness in human life: The ELEMENTAL objective or physical state wherein man is under the control of his sense nature; the RATIONAL or mental plane wherein man uses his mind to think, reason and form judgments; the PSYCHIC which might be defined as an intermediate state between the mental and the spir