SILENCE AND MUSIC 143 



naturally, that it is an instinct, nobody will deny ; it is 

 only music as an art and an end in itself, cultivated 

 in the highest degree for its own sake alone, and 

 taken out of its relation with life, that I am compelled 

 to regard as a mere bye-product of the mind, a beauti- 

 ful excrescence, which is of no importance to the race, 

 and without which most of us are just as rich and 

 happy in our lives. 



This question does not concern us. Music in 

 another wider sense is, like beauty, everywhere; 

 the elemental music of winds and of waters, of 



The lisp of leaves and the ripple of rain, 



and the music of bird voices. For just as the bird, 

 as Ruskin says, is the cloud concentrated, its aerial 

 form perfected and vivified with life; so too in the 

 songs and calls and cries of the winged people do we 

 listen to the diffused elemental music of nature con- 

 centrated and changed to clear penetrative sound. 

 Listen to the concealed reed warbler, quietly singing 

 all day long to himself among the reeds and rushes : 

 it is a series of liquid sounds, the gurgling and chim- 

 ing of lapping water on the shallow pebbled bed of a 

 stream. The beautiful inflected cry of the playing 

 peewit is a mysterious lonely sound, as of some wild 

 half-human being blowing in a hollow reed he had 

 made. Listen again to a band of small shore birds 

 stints, dotterels, knots, and dunlins conversing to- 

 gether as they run about on the level sands, or drop- 



