not the least real appreciation.  They do not know whether it is good or bad, the work of a first-rate or a fifth-rate composer; whether there are coherent elements in it, or whether it is nothing more than ‘a concourse of sweet sounds’ with no organic connections.  One must be educated, no doubt, to understand the more complex and difficult kinds of musical composition.  Go to the great concerts where you know that the music is good, and that you ought to like it whether you do or not.  Take a music-bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.  I wouldn’t trouble myself about the affectations of people who go to this or that series of concerts chiefly because it is fashionable.  Some of these people whom we think so silly and hold so cheap will perhaps find, sooner or later, that they have a dormant faculty which is at last waking up,—­and that they who came because others came, and began by staring at the audience, are listening with a newly found delight.  Every one of us has a harp under bodice or waistcoat, and if it can only once get properly strung and tuned it will respond to all outside harmonies.”

The Professor has some ideas about music, which I believe he has given to the world in one form or another; but the world is growing old and forgetful, and needs to be reminded now and then of what one has formerly told it.

“I have had glimpses,” the Professor said, “of the conditions into which music is capable of bringing a sensitive nature.  Glimpses, I say, because I cannot pretend that I am capable of sounding all the depths or reaching all the heights to which music may transport our mortal consciousness.  Let me remind you of a curious fact with reference to the seat of the musical sense.  Far down below the great masses of thinking marrow and its secondary agents, just as the brain is about to merge in the spinal cord, the roots of the nerve of hearing spread their white filaments out into the sentient matter, where they report what the external organs of hearing tell them.  This sentient matter is in remote connection only with the mental organs, far more remote than the centres of the sense of vision and that of smell.  In a word, the musical faculty might be said to have a little brain of its own.  It has a special world and a private language all to itself.  How can one explain its significance to those whose musical faculties are in a rudimentary state of development, or who have never had them trained?  Can you describe in intelligible language the smell of a rose as compared with that of a violet?  No,—­music can be translated only by music.  Just so far as it suggests worded thought, it falls short of its highest office.  Pure emotional movements of the spiritual nature,—­that is what I ask of music.  Music will be the universal language,—­the Volapuk of spiritual being.”

“Angels sit down with their harps and play at each other, I suppose,” said Number Seven.  “Must have an atmosphere up there if they have harps, or they wouldn’t get any music.  Wonder if angels breathe like mortals?  If they do, they must have lungs and air passages, of course.  Think of an angel with the influenza, and nothing but a cloud for a handkerchief!”