“The mouthpiece of the half-inarticulate, all-suggesting music that is at once the very soul and the inseparable garment of romance.”
George Saintsbury The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1923) p. 258.
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Walther von der Vogelweide 18
Middle High German lyric poet 1170–1230Related quotes

“Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.”

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 390
Context: Our yearnings are homesicknesses for heaven; our sighings are for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, know not that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them.

“Romance is the sweetening of the soul
With fragrance offered by the stricken heart.”
Source: The Lion and the Jewel

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”
Variant: The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

Fiction, Hypnos (1922)
Context: Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments — inarticulateness. What I learned and saw in those hours of impious exploration can never be told — for want of symbols or suggestions in any language. I say this because from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations; sensations correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and space — things which at bottom possess no distinct and definite existence. Human utterance can best convey the general character of our experiences by calling them plungings or soarings...

“[I]n speaking of Italy, romance has omitted for once to exaggerate.”
Source: Letter to Isaac Disraeli (2 September 1826), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (1929), p. 104

Canto II, I
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)

“The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.”
National Music (1934) p. 123.