ABSTRACT
Music comes to birth in idleness, and it can fill idleness with refined peaceful emotions, apparently about nothing. Emotion is indeed independent of the objects to which it may be attached, but never independent of the movement that produces it. Old poets were never tired of celebrating the music of brooks and birds; and it was often through delight in mimicking natural sounds or the cries of animals that men, and especially mocking boys, discovered and began to train their vocal powers. They found that by some precise contortion of their mouths or throats, they could crow for fun as the cock apparently felt obliged to crow in order to publish his dignity as a husband, or challenge his rivals to mortal combat. Crowing was no joke to him, but it was a joke to his human mimic. Mimicry, though it be imitation, is not flattery, rather ridicule: because the mimic can reproduce the airs of his models and parody their seriousness and self-importance without being pledged to any of their physical or moral commitments. The parrot that can reproduce our language so tartly, with scanty vocal organs and nothing to say, gives us the most humiliating proof of the mechanical detachable character of our elocution; also of how accidental the conjunction is of signification with words. Speech is primarily vocal music, and its development in euphony, inflections, and prosody, though intertwined with modes of signification, has its own principles and beauties, never to be disregarded in civilised eloquence.
