In music and the other arts there has been a persistent recognition of the presence and power of the emotions. Whether these emotions have been attributed to the composer, performer, audience, subject matter, or some quality or meaning of the art object itself, emotional expression of some kind or other contributes to most explications of what art is and does.' The purpose of this article is to support an understanding of emotion that regards it as inseparable from knowledge, particularly the kind of knowledge that is conveyed by the arts. It will do so by examining the place of emotion in one kind of meaning making, the religions, and the expression and articulation of religious emotion in works of art. Because of the constraints of this article, its examination will be limited to the claims of a succession of religious philosophers in the Romantic tradition, who each identified a particular emotion as the essence of religion, an emotion that each believed prompts and is prompted by certain cognitive understanding and finds its most persuasive articulation in music and the other arts.