[Music illustration: Hur-rah! A-las!]

[Sidenote: _Music and movement._]

How near a large number of suggestions, which are based wholly upon
experience or association of ideas, lie to the popular fancy, might be
illustrated by scores of examples. Thoughts of religious functions
arise in us the moment we hear the trombones intone a solemn phrase in
full harmony; an oboe melody in sixth-eighth time over a drone bass
brings up a pastoral picture of a shepherd playing upon his pipe;
trumpets and drums suggest war, and so on. The delineation of
movement is easier to the musician than it is to the poet. Handel, who
has conveyed the sensation of a "darkness which might be felt," in a
chorus of his "Israel in Egypt," by means which appeal solely to the
imagination stirred by feelings, has in the same work pictured the
plague of frogs with a frank _naïveté_ which almost upsets our
seriousness of demeanor, by suggesting the characteristic movement of
the creatures in the instrumental accompaniment to the arioso, "Their
land brought forth frogs," which begins thus:

[Sidenote: _Handel's frogs._]

[Music illustration]

[Sidenote: _The movement of water._]

We find the gentle flux and reflux of water as if it were lapping a
rocky shore in the exquisite figure out of which Mendelssohn
constructed his "Hebrides" overture: