236 TPIE OEIGm AOT) FTIN-CTIOX OF MUSIC. 



the chief media of sympathy. And if we consider how 

 much both our general welfare and our immediate pleas- 

 ures depend upon sympathy, we shall recognise the import- 

 ance of whatever makes this sympathy greater. If we 

 bear in mind that by tneir fellow-feeling men are led to be- 

 have justly, kindly and considerately to each other — that 

 the difference between the cruelty of the barbarous and 

 the humanity of the civilized, results from the increase of 

 fellow-feeling ; if we bear in mind that this faculty which 

 makes us sharers in the joys and sorrows of others, is the 

 basis of all the higher affections — that in friendship, love, 

 and all domestic pleasures, it is an essential element ; if we 

 bear in mind how much our direct gratifications are inten- 

 sified by sympathy, — how, at the theatre, the concert, the 

 picture gallery, we lose half our enjoyment if we have no 

 one to enjoy with us ; if, in short, we bear in mind that for 

 all happiness beyond what the unfriended recluse can have, 

 we are indebted to this same sympathy ; — we shall see that 

 the agencies which communicate it can scarcely be over- 

 rated in value. 



The tendency of civilization is more and more to re- 

 press the antagonistic elements of our characters and to 

 develope the social ones — to curb our purely selfish desires 

 and exercise our unselfish ones — to replace private gratifi- 

 cations by gratifications resulting from, or involving, the 

 happiness of others. And while, by this adaj^tation to the 

 social state, the sympathetic side of our nature is being un- 

 folded, there is simultaneously growing up a language of 

 sympathetic intercourse — a language through w^hich we 

 communicate to others the happiness we feel, and are made 

 sharers in their happiness. 



This double process, of which the effects are already 

 sufficiently appreciable, must go on to an extent of which 

 we can as yet have no adequate conception. The habitual 

 concealment of our feelings diminishing, as it must, in pro- 



