Music, according to the ancient people, was not a mechanical science or art: music was the first language. The proof of this can be found even now in the language of the animals and birds, who express their emotions and passions to one another without words, only in sounds. It is the combination of the different sounds of animals and birds which also has an effect upon the numberless multitudes of the lower creation. If music was the first expressive thing in the lower creation, so it was also in the human kind. And since it was the first expression of the emotions and passions of the heart, it is also the last expression of the emotions and passions; for what art cannot express, poetry explains, and what poetry cannot express is expressed by music. To a thinker, therefore, music in all ages will stand on the highest pedestal for the expression of what is deepest in oneself.