We feel plainly that music touches and gently agitates the agreeable and
sublime passions; that it wraps us in melancholy, and elevates us to
joy; that it dissolves and inflames; that it melts us into tenderness,
and rouses into rage: but its strokes are so fine and delicate, that,
like a tragedy, even the passions that are wounded please; its sorrows
are charming, and its rage heroic and delightful. As people feel the
particular passions with different degrees of force, their taste of
harmony must proportionably vary. Music, then, is a language directed to
the passions; but the rudest passions put on a new nature, and become
pleasing in harmony: let me add, also, that it awakens some passions
which we perceive not in ordinary life. Particularly the most elevated
sensation of music arises from a confused perception of ideal or
visionary beauty and rapture, which is sufficiently perceivable to fire
the imagination, but not clear enough to become an object of knowledge.
This shadowy beauty the mind attempts, with a languishing curiosity, to
collect into a distinct object of view and comprehension; but it sinks
and escapes, like the dissolving ideas of a delightful dream, that are
neither within the reach of the memory, nor yet totally fled.
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