Books › The violin, how to make it, 1880 › scan 29
Scan 29
The violin, how to make it, 1880
15 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 23. See the scan on archive.org.
1form color, which, by motion, give off tones of music, filling the universe with celestial sound. Every man has a spark, or microcosmic sun in his own being, and thus microcosmically diffuses rays of light, and tones, broken by the incoherencies of matter, 'tis true, but still, in essence, musical tones. Earthly music is the faintest tradition of the angelic state. It remains in the mind of man as the dream of a lost Paradise.
3"Music is yet master of man's emotions, and therefore of man. Heavenly music is produced from impact upon the paths of planets, which stand as chords or strings to the rays of the Sun; hence, light and heat, travelling between solar centres and circumferences, waken tones, notes, chords, the sum of which is ethereal music. . . . Thus is earthly music a relic, a dream, a memory of heaven, an efflux from the motion of planetary bodies, a celestial speech, whose dim echoes are heard and imitated on earth, and thus are light and tone, colors and music, inextricably combined by one producing cause."
5Now, all this unusual speculation, contradictory to common sense as it may appear, may be nevertheless true when we examine it carefully, and, as it were, dive deep into our own soul-depths, with the wondering effort, if possible, to find it, suspecting that there may be something after all in these views, and in the re-iteration of a relic of a Paradisical and possibly lost music, lost at least to us. As Professor Leslie well observes:—"The doctrine of sound is unquestionably the most subtle and abstruse in the whole range of physical science;" indeed, so much so, that we might almost expect to find it classed under the "Occult Sciences," instead of in the rank assigned it among the secondary mechanical sciences; but the vast and illimitable Universe itself is based upon principles of harmony, for —
7There's not the smallest orb that thou behold'st,
8But in his motion like an angel sings,
9Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim;
10Such harmony is in immortal sounds!
11But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
12Doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it.
14One of the chief requisites in Violin-making is to have in our mind a theory of what we are about, of the accord-
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