FUTURE GROWTH OF EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE. 237 



portion as our feelings become such as do not demand con 

 cealment, AVC may conclude that the exhibition of them will 

 become much more vivid than we now dare allow it to be; 

 and this implies a more expressive emotional language. 

 At the same time, feelings of a higher and more complex 

 kind, as yet experienced only by the cultivated few, will 

 become general ; and there will be a corresponding devel 

 opment of the emotional language into more involved 

 forms. Just as there has silently grown up a language of 

 ideas, which, rude as it at first was, now enables us to con 

 vey with precision the most subtle and complicated 

 thoughts ; so, there is still silently growing up a language 

 of feelings, which notwithstanding its present imperfection, 

 we may expect will ultimately enable men vividly and com 

 pletely to impress on each other all the emotions which 

 they experience from moment to moment. 



Thus if, as we have endeavoured to show, it is the func 

 tion of music to facilitate the development of this emo 

 tional language, we may regard music as an aid to the 

 achievement of that higher happiness which it indistinctly 

 shadows forth. Those vague feelings of unexperienced fe 

 licity which music arouses those indefinite impressions of 

 an unknown ideal life which it calls up, may be considered 

 as a prophecy, to the fulfilment of which music is itself 

 partly instrumental. The strange capacity which we have 

 for being so affected by melody and harmony, may be taken 

 to imply both that it is within the possibilities of our na 

 ture to realize those intenser delights they dimly suggest, 

 and that they are in some way concerned in the realization 

 of them. On this supposition the power and the meaning 

 of music become comprehensible ; but otherwise they are 

 a mystery. 



We will only add, that if the probability of these corol 

 laries be admitted, then music must take rank as the high 

 est of the fine arts as the one which, more than any other, 



