CHAPTER VIII 



SILENCE AND MUSIC 



The art of music Natural music Sussex voices A pretty girl 

 with a musical voice Singing of the peasants Dr. Burton on 

 Sussex singing Primitive singing A shepherdess and her 

 cries The Sussex sheep-dog's temper Silence of the hills 

 Bird music of the downs Common bunting Linnet Stone- 

 chat Whinchat The distance which sound travels Experi- 

 ence with tramps Singing of skylarks Effects which cannot 

 be expressed. 



PERHAPS it would be as well to explain at the outset 

 that about music proper I have next to nothing to say 

 in spite of the heading of this chapter. Music is inex- 

 pressibly delightful, but when I am with or very near 

 to or fresh from nature I am cold to it; and when 

 listening I am in a curious way more than fastidious. 

 That which is wholly satisfying to the trained followers 

 and professors, who live and move and have their 

 beings in a perpetual concord of sweet sounds; that 

 which they regard as perfection and the best ex- 

 pression of all that is best in man, is not a great 

 thing to me. Even when it most enchants me, if it 

 does not wholly swamp my intellect, I have a sense 

 of something abnormal in it, or at all events, of some- 

 thing wholly out of proportion to and out of harmony 

 with things as they exist. That music comes to us 



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