He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

The line captures a character’s impulse toward a restrained, almost impersonal grief—tears prompted not by private misfortune but by the aesthetic and emotional force of language itself. Joyce often treats words as sensuous objects: their sound, rhythm, and associative power can move a listener the way music does. Here, beauty and sadness are inseparable; the “words” evoke a melancholy that is at once intimate and detached, suggesting a modernist awareness that art can generate genuine feeling even when it is not anchored in one’s own biography. The desire to “cry quietly” also signals self-consciousness about emotion—an inward, controlled response to an overwhelming aesthetic experience.