From the beginning of CHAPTER I. THE LISTENER'S PART IN MUSIC. I WONDER if you have ever heard the story of the great nature-lover Thoreau and the Indian arrowhead. It was told by a friend of his who went with him on one of those long walks which he so loved to take all about the country near Concord, and in the course of which he saw and heard such wonderful things. The two men fell to talking of those rude arrowheads, chopped from stone, which are almost the only relics now to be found of the Indian tribes that used to ...
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From the beginning of CHAPTER I. THE LISTENER'S PART IN MUSIC. I WONDER if you have ever heard the story of the great nature-lover Thoreau and the Indian arrowhead. It was told by a friend of his who went with him on one of those long walks which he so loved to take all about the country near Concord, and in the course of which he saw and heard such wonderful things. The two men fell to talking of those rude arrowheads, chopped from stone, which are almost the only relics now to be found of the Indian tribes that used to hunt in that region; and Thoreau's companion expressed his surprise that anyone could ever see, in those wide fields around them, such mere chips of quartz. "Here is one now," replied Thoreau, stooping and picking one up at his friend's very feet. Thoreau was justly proud of his keen powers of observation, and used to explain it by saying that he knew what to look for. "Nature," he writes in one of his books, "does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate-not a grain more.... There is no power to see in the eye itself," he insists; any more than in any other jelly. We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads." And later in the same passage he cries: "Why, it takes a sharpshooter to bring down even such trivial game as snipes and woodcocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what he is aiming at.... And so is it with him that shoots at beauty; though he wait till the sky falls, he will not bag any, if he does not already know its seasons and haunts, and the color of its wing." What is here so well said of the eye is equally true of the ear. As there is indeed no power to see in the eye itself, so there is no power to hear in the ear itself; and we have all read of those " that have eyes and see not, and ears and hear not." We cannot see until we know what to look for; we cannot hear until we learn how to listen. Yet how few people realize what care and study, what love and enthusiasm, are needed to make a good listener, especially to that rarest, subtlest form of sound-music! How many go out to shoot that kind of beauty without the vaguest idea of its "seasons and haunts, and the color of its wing," and, naturally, come back empty-handed!....
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