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Their movements, that in the beginning of the dance had been shy and awkward, became almost beautiful; they forgot arms, hands, feet; their bodies had become like the strings of some skilfully played instrument, obediently responsive to rhythm, and in that composite blending of races each in his dancing brought some of the poetry of his own far land.

An Italian symphony seems almost an anomaly, as strange a product as was once a German opera. It may be a new evidence that to-day national lines, at least in art, are vanishing; before long the national quality will be imperceptible and indeed irrelevant. To be sure we see here an Italian touch in the simple artless stream of tune, the warm resonance, the buoyant spring of rhythm.

The short, sharp staccato, the bellowing turbulent, the swimming melodious circling sentence ARE truly what they mean, in their form as in the objective sense of their words. The sound-values of rhythm and pace have been in other chapters fully dwelt upon; the expressive power of breaks and variations is worth noting also.

There is no evidence that such a rhythm was ever employed in the middle ages, and the fact that words and music were inseparable in Provençal lyrics shows that to infer the nature of the musical rhythm from the rhythm of the words is a perfectly legitimate method of inquiry. A further question arises: how far do the tunes correspond with the structure of the stanza as given by Dante?

Saintsbury has made to give technical rules of metre for the production of the true prose rhythm.

He is referring to the prosecution of Madame Bovary, a book which Taine said might profitably be used in Sunday Schools; and he points out that Flaubert and every other profoundly original writer by avoiding the commonplace phrase, the familiar counter, by deliberately choosing each word, by moulding his language to a personal rhythm, imparts such novelty to his descriptions that the reader seems to himself to be assisting for the first time at a scene which is yet exactly the same as those described in all novels.

As she trudged along the sunny, dusty road, Randy hummed a merry little tune, her footsteps keeping time to its rhythm and her heart beating faster as she thought of her delightful errand. Arrived at the store she asked Mr. Barnes to show her the piece of cloth from which her father had bought on the night that he had driven to the Centre.

The andante is hardly less elaborate than the first movement, but in the finale there is some laying off of the impedimenta of the pageant, as if the paraders had put aside the magnificence for a period of more informal festivity. The spirit is that of the scherzo, and the main theme is the catchiest imaginable, the rhythm curious and irresistible, and the entire mood saturnalian.

It was upon the great scientific doctrine, which we have since seen so completely and brilliantly developed, of the law of harmonic vibrations, extending from atoms and molecules at one end of the series up to worlds and suns at the other end, that Mr. Edison based his invention. Every kind of substance has its own vibratory rhythm. That of iron differs from that of pine wood.

No music can be intelligible without rhythm. The rhythmic pulsations are there; they are distinctly felt by the hearer in the performance, and in modern editions the barring is always introduced; but it is less crude, less obvious, through not being enforced by strong accents. We have already seen how the Volkslied became fertilized by the polyphony of church-music.