AND BODILY STATES UPON THE IMAGINATION. 195 



nance of the clangorous instruments, and the absolute tyranny of 

 the violin. The chorusses were divine to hear; and when Grassini 

 appeared in some interlude, as she often did, and poured forth her 

 passionate soul as Andromache at the tomb of Hector, I question 

 whether any Turk of all that ever entered the Paradise of opium- 

 eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had. But, indeed, I 

 honour the barbarians too much, by supposing them capable of any 

 pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an Englishman: 

 for music is an intellectual or a sensual pleasure, according to the 

 temperament of him who hears it, and, with the exception of that 

 fine extravaganza in The Twelfth Nighty* I do not recollect more 

 than one thing said adequately on the subject of music in all litera- 

 ture ; it is a passage in the Religio Medici of Sir Thomas Brown, 

 and though chiefly remarkable for its sublimity, has also a philoso- 

 phic value, inasmuch as it points to the true theory of musical 

 effects. t The mistake of some people is, to suppose that it is by the 

 ear they communicate with music, and, therefore, that they are 

 purely passive to its effects : but this is not so; it is by the re-action 

 of the mind upon the notices of the ear, that the pleasure is con- 

 structed; and therefore it is that people, of equally good ear, differ 

 So much on this point from each other. Now, opium, by greatly 

 increasing the activity of the mind generally, increases, of necessity, 

 that particular mode of its activity by which we are enabled to 

 construct, out of the raw material of organic sound, an elaborate 

 intellectual pleasure. A chorus displays before me, as on a piece of 

 arras, the whole of my past life; — not as though recalled by an act 

 of memory, — but as if present and incarnate in the music; no 



* " That strain again ;— it had a dying fall: 

 O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south, 

 That breathes upon a bank of violets, 

 Stealing, and giving odour." 



t "Whatsoever is harmonically composed, delights in harmony : for even 

 that vulgar and tavern music, which makes one man merry, another mad, 

 strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first 

 composer. There is something in music of divinity, more than the ear dis- 

 covers; it is an hieroglyphicafand shadowed lesson of the whole world and 

 creatures of God, — such a melody to the ear, as the whole world well under- 

 stood would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that 

 harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God. I will not say, 

 with Plato, that the soul is a harmony ; — but barmonical, and hath its near- 

 est sympathy unto music." 



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