258 PASSION AND PLAY 



apprehension — the weight on the heart — fear and 

 desperation, and blank despair; fury and pain, and 

 every form of misery to utter desolation ; and the 

 softer emotions, sexual and parental, love and affec- 

 tion, friendship and comradeship and loyalty; also 

 the sense of the supernatural — the invisible watch- 

 ing eyes, the ever-following footsteps that make no 

 sound, the evil beings that inhabit the darkness — 

 the mystery, the amazement ; and finally the strange 

 intrusion of beneficent impulses, of tenderness, of a 

 dawning sense of beauty, of a changed aspect in 

 Nature, of a sense of a softened understanding mood 

 in the Unseen, of compassion and fatherhood. 



Through "inherited association" it all lives in 

 music. Shakespeare's verse, "I am never merry 

 when I hear sweet music," finds an echo in every- 

 one simply because each one of us puts his private 

 interpretation on the "sweet," which means for us 

 music that produces a shade of melancholy — in other 

 words, the music which touches our deeper feelings. 



At the same time we know a music of a lighter 

 character, a music which does not move us in the 

 same way. And this too is emotional, derived from 

 the lighter, gayer emotions of play, an instinct 

 universal in children, and in a lesser degree con- 

 tinuing through life both in man and the lower 

 animals. You may witness the effect of an appeal 

 to children of this kind of music any day when any 

 lively or dance tunes are played and the child's face 

 begins to brighten and its feet and hands to move, 

 and by-and-by, if it is not a child whose child- 



