communication, is that of Music, in the form of song. The young ear drinks in, instinctively and intuitively, the beauty of sound, as the eye takes in that of form and color. The laws of melodic variation of tone seem to be inscribed on the human ear, with few exceptions, as the laws of graceful form and expansion are stamped on the plant. But the musical sense is not a merely dry perception or recognition, or a mechanical obedience to law. It is one of the most delightful forms in which man becomes conscious of the pleasure of feeling or the power of emotion; and, as his culture extends, he recognizes it as the intelligent utterance of sentiment, in the noblest expressions of social sympathy, or even of devotional aspiration. The imitative practice of music, accordingly, in all its forms, from the humblest lullaby of the nursery to the most exalted strains of the perfect vocalist, becomes a powerful discipline of the ear, because of the heart, the intellect, and the imagination. It prepares them to receive more fully the impressions of the melody of speech, and, in due season, to give forth their effects in appropriate expression. The child imbibes from the mother's song the theme of its own imitative efforts, and from the simple beauty of the natural model, catches, at the same time, unconsciously, the emotion of which it is the utterance, and thus early learns to unite expression with feeling. At a later stage of his musical culture and development, he acquires more consciously and more distinctly, a perception of the inspiration which marks the tones of the empassioned eloquence of the orator and the poet, and learns to appreciate the delicious melody of the "numerous verse" which "clothes the poet's thought in fitting sound." The great masters in musical science and art, abundantly prove, by the transcendent delight which their efforts yield to universal man, the power and value of music as an expressive art, independently of its relation to the cultivation of the power of language. But the intensity of pleasure derived from the perfection of musical composition and execution combined, suggests instructively to the educator the power which even the elementary practice of this imitative art exerts on the character of expression, when embodied in the forms of language, the ability which it gives to touch the heart, or to kindle emotion, and to throw the whole soul of the speaker and the writer into the mould of utterance. 5. PERSONATION: its Tendency and Effects, as a Mode of Expression. The faculty of imitation with which man is endowed, as a form of expressive power, leading him to the acquisition of language, is early manifested in the passion of childhood for Personation; the living, actual representation of what he sees going on in the human world around him. The lively feelings of the child are not satisfied with the mere verbal presentation of thought and feeling in the arbitrary and conventional forms of language. He has an instinctive desire to impersonate the being of others in himself, and thus to enter more fully into their feelings, and acquire a truer power of expressing them. To his fresh sympathies and ever active imagination, life around him is a drama: "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women are but players," each performing his part. The child, the primitive man, the poet, all tend to dramatize human life, and to present it in living impersonation. The boy struts the mimic soldier, to his own mimic music; he drags his little wagon as an imaginary fire-engine, or mounts a chair and plays the orator to his little mates. In his puerile sports, he enacts a character or an incident, in dumb show, and requires that his juvenile companions shall express it in words. He personates a hero in history, or makes one in a group in a tableau, in which, as an Indian brave, he is about to dash out the brains of Captain Smith with his war-club, when his sister, as the compassionate princess Pocahontas, rushes in, and rescues the hero. At the academy exhibition, he personifies Mark Antony weeping over the murdered Cæsar, and with words of fire rousing the Romans to mutiny, "crying havoc! and letting slip the dogs of war;" or he resorts, in preference, to the pen, and dramatizes a scene from his country's history, which he and his class-mates enact to the life, according to their power. In the maturity of his intellect, and amid the grave duties of professional life, he pauses, perhaps, to recreate himself, and delight the world with the production of a Comus or a Hamlet, in which, besides furnishing the composition, he still takes an active part in the business of representation, and, true to the dramatic instinct of his nature, sustains a character himself. It is thus that he completes the educational training by which he attains to the height of eloquence and expressive power in word and action; and this dramatic faculty of personation, while it gives vividness and intensity to his utterance, proclaims the meaning and intention of the self-discipline to which he was early impelled, by unconscious instinct. 6. REPRESENTATION: The Language of Signs.-In addition to the more imaginative and, sometimes, physical or corporeal manifestations of expressive power, which the human being exhibits in imitative acts, he possesses, as his special attribute, in virtue of his intellectual endowments, working in unison with the instinctive elements of his nature, that peculiar faculty of Representation, by which he is enabled to suggest his thoughts or feelings to the mind of his fellow man, by substituting for graphic or mimetic, or other forms of delineation, con ventional signs, audible or visible, devised by his imaginative faculties of invention and combination. These signs are recognized and defined by his conceptive intellect; they are interpreted by the understanding, acting on a law of arbitrary association, established by mutual agreement or common consent, and ultimately sanctioned by prevalent usage. Furnished with this primitive telegraphic apparatus of audible and visible signs, man is enabled to put himself in communication with his sympathetic, intelligent, and rational fellowbeings, to reveal to them the workings of his mind, and disclose the inmost secrets of his heart. Speech and Writing.-Disciplined and perfected by art and skill, and aided by ingenious and asiduous educational cultivation, man's primitive power of utterance and expression, ultimately manifests itself in the consummated forms of spoken and written language, regulated by the laws of thought, as dictated by the sciences of logic and grammar, and adorned by the graces of rhetoric. Language, a measure of Power.--The feeble but persevering endeavors of childhood to conquer the difficulties of articulation, and to compass the power of oral expression, indicate, by the successive years which the task demands, how arduous is its accomplishment, and how thoroughly it puts to proof the ability which the young human being possesses to direct and develop his own powers of execution. Yet more striking is the magnitude of the task and the triumph, in the progress achieved by the student of written language, from the date of his first attempt, in boyhood, to pen a letter or compose a theme, to the time when, in the maturity of his intellectual manhood, he rises to address assembled multitudes of his fellow men, and to sway them by the potency of triumphant eloquence; or when he issues from his poetic privacy a work which shall live for ages, as an object of wonder and admiration. Pictured and Written Characters.--Somewhat similar, indeed, have been the difficulty and the progress in the attainment of a mastery over the merely external part of written language; as we perceive when tracing the process from its primal rude attempts in the form of graphic delineations, through its advancement to symbolic representation, and, ultimately, to phonetic characters and alphabetic letters. Of the width of this vast field of human labor, and of the toil which its cultivation has cost, we have no adequate conception, till we look at the graphic delineations which form the historical records of Nineveh, or at the symbolic hieroglyphics and the clumsy phonetic characters inscribed on the temples of Egypt, and then contrast with these the simple and symmetrical letters of the Greek or Roman alphabet, known and read alike throughout the ancient and modern world of civilization. The Value of Language.--Man's expressive power seems to have consummated itself in the representative phenomena of language. In this form his whole nature, animal, intellectual, and moral, finds effectual utterance; and by this instrumentality, does he become preëminently a progressive being. Language is the channel in which the ceaseless stream of mental action flows onward to its great results. Without this outlet, his soul, imprisoned within itself, would stagnate, and all its wondrous powers perish from inaction. As the medium of communication between mind and mind, language renders education practicable, and brings to the aid of the individual the accumulated thoughts of all times and of all men. Language is the peculiar and chosen province of education. Every process of human culture is conducted through its agency; every result attained in human progress is recorded in its terms; and in every civilized and cultivated community language is justly taken as the measure of individual and social attainment. 7. TASTE: The Signification of the Term.-The word "Taste," employed to designate one of the expressive faculties, might seem, from its primary signification, (relish,) to be one appropriately applied rather to a passive and receptive condition of mind, than to one so active or energetic as are all those which are properly termed "expressive." But, in the affairs of the mental world, not less than in those of the political, influence is often more efficient than power. So it is with Taste.-The office of this faculty in relation to expression, is to retain, in the selection and use of language, the relish for appropriateness, symmetry, and grace, which the soul has imbibed from the primitive beauty of the forms and the effects-in other words, the language-of nature, that other name for life and truth. Character of True Taste.-As true taste secures genuine beauty of effect, it is not a merely passive power. It rejects every false savor; for it relishes only the true. It refuses to inhale the flavor of the artificial perfume; because it prefers the aroma of nature. It detests the ugly, and shuns the ungraceful; but it loves the truly beautiful, and builds the fabric of noble thought "after the pattern shown it on the mount," as a chaste harmonious whole, conceived in pure ideal perfection, and executed with faultless skill, like that structure which "Rose like an exhalation, with the sound Taste is not a quality merely negative in its influence: it is, in language, a positive power. It suggests and prescribes beauty; and, in all expression, beauty is power. Taste virtually decides and ordains the forms of language. It is therefore justly classed as an expressive. faculty. It blends its effects, undoubtedly, with those of imagination and fancy, and with those of sentiment and emotion; controlling and directing and modifying these by its intuitive recognition of the eternal laws of beauty and proportion, and instinctively rejecting every blemish. If it is sometimes lost, to appearance, in the effects produced by the more obvious working of other expressive forces; its actual presence and power are not less deeply felt in the pervading harmony which, in such circumstances, it has established, and the genuine beauty which it has diffused. Its influence extends over every form of expressive art; and its results are equally legible in all. It guides the pencil of the painter, the chisel of the sculptor, the tool of the artizan, the hand of the musician, the pen of the poet, the voice and action of the speaker. It reigns over every form of language; and it moulds alike habit, character, and manners; for all of these are but varied modes of expression. Taste, under the Influence of Culture.-Of all the faculties with which man is endued, none, perhaps, is more susceptible of cultivation than taste; and none yields larger results to the process. Trained under the fresh aspects of nature, and the strict discipline of truth, it becomes one of the most healthful influences that a liberal culture infuses into the human soul. It leads to the true, the pure, and the beautiful, in every relation of thought and feeling. Next to the hallowing influence of religious principle, it elevates and refines the whole being, and confers pure and lasting enjoyment on its possessor. It forms one of the most attractive graces of character, and breathes a genuine charm over the aspect of social life. But neglected, corrupted, or perverted, deprived of the healthful air of nature, abandoned to coarse and low association, vitiated by the influence of false custom, distorted by conventional regulations, or tainted by the impure atmosphere of vice, taste becomes depraved, and morbidly craves deformity instead of beauty, and prefers falsehood to truth. (II.) THE ACTUATING PRINCIPLE, OR IMPELLING FORCE, OF THE EXPRESSIVE FACULTIES. FEELING its Office in Expression.-The Sensibility with which the constitution of man, as a sentient animal and as a self-conscious moral being, is invested, and by which he is stimulated to action and to utterance, may, for our present purpose, be defined as that element in his nature, which,--whether manifesting itself in temporary sympathy, in permanent affections,-in vivid emotion, or intense passion |