As we are wont to argue the invisible things of God, even his eternal
power and Godhead, from the things that are seen, finding them all
images of thought and vehicles of intelligence, so we have an argument
for God more impressive, in one view, because the matter of it is
so deep and mysterious, from the fact that a grand, harmonic,
soul-interpreting law of music pervades all the objects of the material
creation, and that things without life, all metals and woods and valleys
and mountains and waters, are tempered with distinctions of sound, and
toned to be a language to the feeling of the heart. It is as if God had
made the world about us to be a grand organ of music, so that our
feelings might have play in it, as our understanding has in the light of
the sun and the outward colors and forms of things. What is called the
musical scale, or octave, is fixed in the original appointments of sound
just as absolutely and definitely as the colors of the rainbow or prism
in the optical properties and laws of light. And the visible objects of
the world are not more certainly shaped and colored to us under the
exact laws of light and the prism, than they are tempered and toned, as
objects audible, to give distinctions of sound by their vibrations in
the terms of the musical octave. It is not simply that we hear the sea
roar and the floods clap their hands in anthems of joy; it is not that
we hear the low winds sigh, or the storms howl dolefully, or the ripples
break peacefully on the shore, or the waters dripping sadly from the
rock, or the thunders crashing in horrible majesty through the pavements
of heaven; not only do all the natural sounds we hear come to us in
tones of music as interpreters of feeling, but there is hid in the
secret temper and substance of all matter a silent music, that only
waits to sound and become a voice of utterance to the otherwise
unutterable feeling of our heart--a voice, if we will have it, of love
and worship to the God of all.
First, there is a musical scale in the laws of the air itself, exactly
answering to the musical sense or law of the soul. Next, there is in all
substances a temperament of quality related to both; so that whatever
kind of feeling there may be in a soul--war and defiance, festivity and
joy, sad remembrance, remorse, pity, penitence, self-denial, love,
adoration--may find some fit medium of sound in which to express itself.
And, what is not less remarkable, connected with all these forms of
substances there are mathematical laws of length and breadth, or
definite proportions of each, and reflective angles, that are every way
as exact as those which regulate the colors of the prism, the images of
the mirror, or the telescopic light of astronomic worlds--mathematics
for the heart as truly as for the head.
It cannot be said that music is a human creation, and as far as the
substances of the world are concerned, a mere accident. As well can it
be said that man creates the colors of the prism, and that they are not
in the properties of the light, because he shapes the prism by his own
mechanical art. Or if still we doubt; if it seems incredible that the
soul of music is in the heart of all created being; then the laws of
harmony themselves shall answer, one string vibrating to another, when
it is not struck itself, and uttering its voice of concord simply
because the concord is in it and it feels the pulses on the air to which
it cannot be silent. Nay, the solid mountains and their giant masses of
rock shall answer; catching, as they will, the bray of horns or the
stunning blast of cannon, rolling it across from one top to another in
reverberating pulses, till it falls into bars of musical rhythm and
chimes and cadences of silver melody. I have heard some fine music, as
men are wont to speak--the play of orchestras, the anthems of choirs,
the voices of song that moved admiring nations. But in the lofty passes
of the Alps I heard a music overhead from God's cloudy orchestra, the
giant peaks of rock and ice, curtained in by the driving mist and only
dimly visible athwart the sky through its folds, such as mocks all
sounds our lower worlds of art can ever hope to raise. I stood (excuse
the simplicity) calling to them, in the loudest shouts I could raise,
even till my power was spent, and listening in compulsory trance to
their reply. I heard them roll it up through their cloudy worlds of
snow, sifting out the harsh qualities that were tearing in it as demon
screams of sin, holding on upon it as if it were a hymn they were fining
to the ear of the great Creator, and sending it round and round in long
reduplications of sweetness, minute after minute; till finally receding
and rising, it trembled, as it were, among the quick gratulations of
angels, and fell into the silence of the pure empyrean. I had never any
conception before of what is meant by _quality_ in sound. There was more
power upon the soul in one of those simple notes than I ever expect to
feel from anything called music below, or ever can feel till I hear them
again in the choirs of the angelic world. I had never such a sense of
purity, or of what a simple sound may tell of purity by its own pure
quality; and I could not but say, O my God, teach me this! Be this in me
forever! And I can truly affirm that the experience of that hour has
consciously made me better able to think of God ever since--better able
to worship. All other sounds are gone; the sounds of yesterday, heard in
the silence of enchanted multitudes, are gone; but that is with me
still, and I hope will never cease to ring in my spirit till I go down
to the slumber of silence itself.