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[Music.]

Melody consists in a certain fluidity of sounds, flowing and sweet as the honey from which it took its name.

The periodic air suits only the expression of feelings in which the soul loves, so to speak, to circulate, and from which it can part only after a long detour. All emotions that are expressed only to breathe them out and make oneself calmer admit the periodic air only insofar as it is short and broken, like the famous air Che faro senza Euridice.

The most beautiful sounds, the most beautiful words are absolute, and have between them natural intervals that must be observed in pronouncing them. When they are crowded and joined together, they are made like those transparent globules that flatten as soon as they touch, lose their transparency as they stick to one another, and form only a pasty body when thus reduced to a mass.

Sing without intervals Object of my love, pronounce without intervals It was day, etc.

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Music

Certainly all the effects of music are founded on the varied diastole and systole that sounds cause to be experienced, not by the pulse, but by the heart, the lung, the flow of the humors and of respiration, on the rising and relaxation that take place invisibly in the soft and solid parts of the whole body, as they take place visibly in the movements of a young girl’s breast. It is by this means alone that music can arouse affections in us; and so its great power resides above all in measure. Through the quality of its sounds, more or less beautiful, more or less sweet, more or less full, it paints for us a nature more or less beautiful; but it is only through the combination of its sounds, through their different successions, their different durations and endings, that it communicates to us, more or less, the passions it expresses. It has not yet been observed how much the way life runs its course in man at every instant varies according to the moral affections he experiences. In happy love, the humors, the blood, respiration, movement circulate within us evenly, fully, freely, like the undulations of sound in a resonant body whose form is perfectly round, whose material is perfectly homogeneous, and whose surface is absolutely smooth and without roughness. In the sorrow of absence, respiration (to cite only this part of man) is infrequent, suspended, and drawn out at long intervals; in grief it is irregular, like the pulse during fever; in joy it is too quick and too frequent, etc. The different sounds, whose sole medium is the air we breathe, certainly regulate our breathing in different ways and thus affect the entire animal economy. I do not doubt that, if a pneumato-meter could be invented that recorded our breaths and made them perceptible to the eye, a demonstration of these assertions would be obtained. I am sure it would be clearly seen that our breathing changes in nature or pace at every sight, every touch, every look, every thought that varies our affections. In the man lost in reverie whose body is left to its own laws and, so to speak, to its own inclination, I have noticed that his walk follows the natural movement of the pulse uniformly; each of his steps beats the measure of a pulsation; likewise, in the inward man each pulsation also beats the measure of the music one hears, etc., etc.