Again, monotony after a certain time, or beyond a certain degree, becomes either uninteresting or intolerable, and the musician is obliged to break it in one or two ways:  either while the air or passage is perpetually repeated, its notes are variously enriched and harmonized; or else, after a certain number of repeated passages, an entirely new passage is introduced, which is more or less delightful according to the length of the previous monotony.  Nature, of course, uses both these kinds of variation perpetually.  The sea-waves, resembling each other in general mass, but none like its brother in minor divisions and curves, are a monotony of the first kind; the great plain, broken by an emergent rock or clump of trees, is a monotony of the second.

Farther:  in order to the enjoyment of the change in either case, a certain degree of patience is required from the hearer or observer.  In the first case, he must be satisfied to endure with patience the recurrence of the great masses of sound or form, and to seek for entertainment in a careful watchfulness of the minor details.  In the second case, he must bear patiently the infliction of the monotony for some moments, in order to feel the full refreshment of the change.  This is true even of the shortest musical passage in which the element of monotony is employed.  In cases of more majestic monotony, the patience required is so considerable that it becomes a kind of pain,—­a price paid for the future pleasure.

Again:  the talent of the composer is not in the monotony, but in the changes:  he may show feeling and taste by his use of monotony in certain places or degrees; that is to say, by his various employment of it; but it is always in the new arrangement or invention that his intellect is shown, and not in the monotony which relieves it.

Lastly:  if the pleasure of change be too often repeated, it ceases to be delightful, for then change itself becomes monotonous, and we are driven to seek delight in extreme and fantastic degrees of it.  This is the diseased love of change of which we have above spoken.

From these facts we may gather generally that monotony is, and ought to be, in itself painful to us, just as darkness is; that an architecture which is altogether monotonous is a dark or dead architecture; and of those who love it, it may be truly said, “they love darkness rather than light.”  But monotony in certain measure, used in order to give value to change, and above all, that transparent monotony, which, like the shadows of a great painter, suffers all manner of dimly suggested form to be seen through the body of it, is an essential in architectural as in all other composition; and the endurance of monotony has about the same place in a healthy mind that the endurance of darkness has:  that is to say, as a strong intellect will have pleasure in the solemnities of storm and twilight, and in the broken and mysterious lights that gleam among them, rather than in mere