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Nightingales are calling to one another among the trees of the orchard, and the entire landscape seems imbued with their amorous music. What ecstasy to listen to them! What serenity their liquid harmonies spread over the smiling landscape, faintly revealing its beauties in the mild starlight. Who would think that preparations for deadly combat were going on through the serenity of such a night?
He had used both as models for his dainty music. His harmonies, he was wont to explain, came to him in woman's shape. To express Japan he must see a Japanese woman. Not that he had any interest in Japanese women, physically. They are too different from our women, he used to think; and the difference repelled and fascinated him.
In the intricate path of deep musing we feel the mantle of a Schumann who had himself a kind of heritage from Bach. And thus we come to see the national spirit best and most articulate through the medium of ancient art. The main Allegro melody not so much grows out of the Largo prelude, as it is of the same fibre and identity. The violins sing here against a stately march of harmonies.
This exalted state of mind is also experienced by those who listen to profane music, since the harmony and modulation of sound, and the expression given to it by the combination of various instruments, immediately affect the soul of the listener as a whole, without the aid of reflection, and a substantial entity which deliberately fulfils its spontaneous cycle of development is thus created; in a word, the harmonies they hear are unconsciously personified.
MYSTERIOUS impulse at the heart, which never suffers us to be at rest, which urges us onward as by an unseen yet irresistible law human planets in a petty orbit, hurried forever and forever, till our course is run and our light is quenched through the circle of a dark and impenetrable destiny! art thou not some faint forecast and type of our wanderings hereafter; of the unslumbering nature of the soul; of the everlasting progress which we are predoomed to make through the countless steps and realms and harmonies in the infinite creation?
The latest generations of men will find new meanings in Shakespeare, new elucidations of their own human being; "new harmonies with the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man." This well deserves meditating. It is Nature's highest reward to a true simple great soul, that he get thus to be a part of herself.
I hear the most beautiful, heavenly music, and the sound as of many voices singing together in the sweetest of harmonies. I see the gilded domes and minarets of a wondrous city that seems to be built in the centre of the zenith. I am wafted nearer and nearer to it, borne up on the pinions of the air. And, now, I can discern its golden gates! There, stands Min, again, before them.
The constructive, rather than the destructive, method of activity must increasingly animate all. The Mohammedans are peculiarly sensitive; and there is so much of contact between their faith and ours that through the pathway of the harmonies of the faiths men must be led to know and feel the supreme excellence and power of the faith of the Christ.
Far beyond all power to analyze as it was just then, the complete idea embraced me as instantaneously as had the picturesque chillness of the first. I have called it tumultuous, but merely in respect of rhythm: the harmonies were as clear and evolved as the modulation itself was sharp, keen, and unapproachable.
Out of this confused complexity arises entire sensation of the animal harmonies, that is, the highest possible combined sensation of animal pleasure, which ranges itself, as it were, alongside of the original intellectual or moral sensation, which this addition infinitely increases. Thus is every agreeable affection the source of countless bodily pleasures.
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