Kitabı oku: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 56, June, 1862», sayfa 14
STRUCTURAL SERIES
Halcyonoids: eight tentacles in pairs, lobed around the margin; always combined in large communities, some of which are free and movable like single animals.
Madrepores: twelve tentacles, alternating in six larger and six smaller ones; frequently a larger top animal standing prominent in the whole community, or on the summit of its branches.
Porites: twelve tentacles, not alternating in size; system of connected beams.
Astraeans: tentacles not definitely limited in number, though usually not exceeding one hundred, and generally much below this number; transverse floors. Maeandrines, generally referred to Astraeans, are higher than the true Astraeans, on account of their compound Polyps.
Fungidae: indefinite multiplication of tentacles; imperfect transverse beams.
Actiniae: indefinite multiplication of tentacles; soft bodies and no transverse beams.
If, now, we compare this structural gradation among Polyps with their geological succession, we shall find that they correspond exactly. The following table gives the geological order in which they have been introduced upon the surface of the earth.
GEOLOGICAL SUCCESSION
Present, Halcyonoids.
Pliocene, \
Miocene, } Madrepores.
Eocene, /
Cretaceous, \ Porites
Jurassic, } and
Triassic, } Astraeans.
Permian, /
Carboniferous, \
Devonian, } Fungidae
Silurian, /
With regard to the geological position of the Actiniae we can say nothing, because, if their soft, gelatinous bodies have left any impressions in the rocks, none such have ever been found; but their absence is no proof that they did not exist, since it is exceedingly improbable that animals destitute of any hard parts could be preserved.
The position of the Corals on a Reef accords with these series of structural gradation and geological succession. It is true that we do not find the Actiniae in the Reef any more than in the crust of the earth, for the absence of hard parts in their bodies makes them quite unfit to serve as Reef-Builders. Neither do we find the Fungidae, for they, like all low forms, are single, and not confined to one level, having a wider range in depth and extent than other stony Polyps. But the true Reef-Building Polyps follow each other on the Reef in the same order as prevails in their structural gradation and their geological succession; and whether we classify them according to their position on the Reef, or their introduction upon the earth in the course of time, or their relative rank, the result is the same.
[Illustration: SUCCESSION ON THE REEF.]
It would require an amount of details that would be tedious to many of my readers, were I to add here the evidence to prove that the embryological development of these animals, so far as it is known, and their geographical distribution over the whole surface of our globe, show the same correspondence with the other three series. But this recurrence of the same thought in the history of animals of the same Type, so that, from whatever side we consider them, their creation and existence seem to be guided by one Mind, is so important in the study of Nature, that I shall constantly refer to it in the course of these papers, even though I may sometimes be accused of unnecessary repetition.
What is the significance of these coincidences? They were not sought for by the different investigators, who have worked quite independently, while ascertaining all these facts, without even knowing that there was any relation between the objects of their studies. The succession of fossil Corals has been found in the rocks by the geologist,—the embryologist has followed the changes in the growth of the living Corals,—the zoölogist has traced the geographical distribution and the structural relations of the full-grown animals; but it is only after the results of their separate investigations are collected and compared that the coincidence is perceived, and alt find that they have been working unconsciously to one end. These thoughts in Nature, which we are too prone to call simply facts, when in reality they are the ideal conception antecedent to the very existence of all created beings, are expressed in the objects of our study. It is not the zoölogist who invents the structural relations establishing a gradation between all Polyps,—it is not the geologist who places them in the succession in which he finds them in the rocks,—it is not the embryologist who devises the changes through which the living Polyps pass as he watches their growth; they only read what they see, and when they compare their results they all tell the same story. He who reads most correctly from the original is the best naturalist. What unites all their investigations and makes them perfectly coherent with each other is the coincidence of thought expressed in the facts themselves. In other words, it is the working of the same Intellect through all time, everywhere.
When we observe the practical results of this sequence in the position of Corals on the Reef, we cannot fail to see that it is not a mere accidental difference of structure and relation, but that it bears direct reference to the part these little beings were to play in Creation. It places the solid part of the structure at the base of the Reef,—it fills in the interstices with a lighter growth,—it crowns the summit with the more delicate kinds, that yield to the action of the tides and are easily crushed into the fine sand that forms the soil,—it makes a masonry solid, compact, time-defying, such a masonry as was needed by the great Architect, who meant that these smallest creatures of His hand should help to build His islands and His continents.
THE AUTHOR OF "CHARLES AUCHESTER."
When Mr. Disraeli congratulated himself that in the "Wondrous Tale of Alroy" he had invented a new style, he scarcely deemed that he had but spun the thread which was to vibrate with melody under the hand of another. For in none of his magical sentences is the spell exactly complete, and nowhere do they drop into the memory with that long slow rhythm and sweet delay which mark every distinct utterance of Elizabeth Sheppard. Yet at his torch she lit her fires, over his stories she dreamed, his "Contarini Fleming" she declared to be the touchstone of all romantic truth, and with the great freights of thought argosied along his pages she enriched herself. "Destiny is our will, and our will is our nature," he says. Behold the key-note of those strangely beautiful Romances of Temperament of which for ten years we have been cutting the leaves!
In "Venetia," hint and example were given of working the great ores that lie in the fields about us; and when Elizabeth Sheppard in turn took up the divining-rod, it sought no clods of baser metal, but gold-veined masses of crystal and the clear currents of pure water-streams;—beneath her compelling power, Mendelssohn—Beethoven—Shelley—lived again and forever.
The musician who perhaps inspired a profounder enthusiasm during his lifetime than any other ever did had been missed among men but a few years, when a little book was quietly laid upon his shrine, and he received, as it were, an apotheosis. Half the world broke into acclaim over this outpouring of fervid worship. But it was private acclaim, and not to be found in the newspapers. To those who, like the most of us in America, vainly hunger and thirst after the sweets of sound, the book was an initiation into the very penetralia of music, we mounted and rested in that sphere from the distastes of too practical life, long afterwards we seemed to hear the immortal Song of which it spoke, and our souls were refreshed. There followed this in a year—inscribed to Mrs. Disraeli, as the other had been to that lady's husband—"Counterparts": a novel which, it is not too much to say, it is impossible for human hand to excel;—superior to its predecessor, since that was but a memorial, while this was the elaboration of an Idea. Here the real author ceased awhile. Three succeeding books were but fancies wrought out, grafts, happy thoughts, very possibly enforced work; but there were no more spontaneous affairs of her own individuality, until the one entitled "Almost a Heroine." In this work, which treated of the possible perfection of marriage, the whole womanly nature of the writer asserted itself by virtue of the mere fact of humanity. After this came a number of juvenile stories, some commonplace, others infiltrated with that subtile charm which breathes, with a single exception, through all her larger books like the perfume of an exotic. Thus in the three novels mentioned we have all that can be had of Elizabeth Sheppard herself: in the third, her theory of life; in the second, her aspirations and opinions; in the first, her passion.
The orphaned daughter of an English clergyman, and self-dependent, in 1853 she translated her name into French and published "Charles Auchester,"—a book written at the age of sixteen. That name of hers is not the most attractive in the tongue, but all must love it who love her; for, if any theory of transmission be true, does she not owe something of her own oneness with Nature, of her intimacy with its depths, of her love of fields and flowers and skies, to that ancestry who won the name as, like the princely Hebrew boy, they tended the flocks upon the hills, under sunlight and starlight and ill every wind that blew? Never was there a more characteristic device than this signature of "E. Berger"; and nobody learned anything by it. At first it was presumed that some member of the house of Rothschild had experienced a softening of the brain to the extent implied by such effusion of genuine emotion, and it was rather gladly hailed as evidence of the weakness shared in common with ordinary mortals by that more than imperial family, the uncrowned potentates of the world,—the subject and method of the book being just sufficiently remote from every-day to preserve the unities of the supposition. Gradually this theory was sought to be displaced by one concerning a German baroness acquainted neither with Jews nor with music, humored as it was by that foreign trick in the book, the idioms of another tongue; but the latter theory was too false on its face to be tenable, and then people left off caring about it. It is perhaps an idle infirmity, this request for the personality of authors; yet it is indeed a response to the fact that there never was one who did not prefer to be esteemed for himself rather than for his writing,—and, ascending, may we love the works of God and not the Lord himself? However, none were a whit the wiser for knowing Miss Sheppard's name. It came to be accepted that we were to have the books,—whence was no matter; they were so new, so strange, so puzzling,—the beautiful, the quaint, and the faulty were so interwoven, that nobody cared to separate these elements, to take the trouble to criticize or to thank; and thus, though we all gladly enough received, we kept our miserly voices to ourselves, and she never met with any adequate recognition. After her first book, England quietly ignored her,—they could not afford to be so startled; as Sir Leicester Dedlock said, "It was really—really—"; she did very well for the circulating libraries; and because Mr. Mudie insists on his three volumes or none at all, she was forced to extend her rich webs to thinness. It is this alone that injures "Counterparts" for many;—not that they would not gladly accept the clippings in a little supplementary pamphlet, but dissertations, they say, delay the action. In this case, though, that is not true; for, besides the incompleteness of the book without the objectionable dissertation, (that long conversation between Miss Dudleigh and Sarona,) it answers the purpose of very necessary by-play on the stage during preparation for the last and greatest scene. But had this been a fault, it was not so much hers as the publishers'. Subject to the whims of those in London, and receiving no reply to the communication of her wishes from those in Edinburgh, she must have experienced much injustice at the hands of her booksellers, and her title-pages show them to have been perpetually changed. She herself accepts with delight propositions from another quarter of the globe; the prospect of writing for those across the water was very enticing to her; and in one of her letters she says,—"It is my greatest ambition to publish in America,—to have no more to do personally with English publishers"; and finding it, after serious illness, impossible to fulfil this engagement in season, the anxiety, regret, and subsequent gratitude, which she expressed, evinced that she had been unaccustomed to the courteous consideration then received.
Working constantly for so many years, she had yet known nothing of her readers, had felt her literary life to be an utter failure, had thrown a voice into the world and heard no echo; and when for the first time told of the admiration she elicited in this country and of one who rejoiced in her, her face kindled and she desired to come and be among her own people. Those who have failed to appreciate her can hardly be blamed, as it is owing entirely to their deficiency; but the cavillers—those who have ears and hear not—are less excusable. Almost a recluse,—declining even an interview with her publishers,—in ill-health, in poverty, and with waning youth, she poured out her precious ointment from alabaster boxes, and there were not wanting Pharisees. But hampered by precedent and somewhat barren of enthusiasms as are almost all productions now, how could we do aught but welcome this spontaneous and ever-fresh fountain bubbling into the sunlight, albeit without geometrical restrictions, and bringing as it did such treasures from its secret sources? Yet, welcomed or not, there is no record of any female prose-writer's ever having lived who possessed more than a portion of that genius which permeated Elizabeth Sheppard's whole being. Genius,—the very word expresses her: in harmony with the great undertone of the universe, the soul suffused with light. Flower-warmth and fragrance are on her page, the soft low summer wind seems to be speaking with you as you read, her characters are like the stars impersonated, and still, however lofty her nature, always and forever genial. You catch her own idiosyncrasy throughout, and believe, that, like Evelyn Hope, she was made of spirit, fire, and dew. When we remember the very slight effect ever visible to her of all her labor, there is something sad in the thought of this young soul, thrilled with its own fervors and buoyant in anticipation, sending forth the first venture. But then we recognize as well, that she was one of those few to whom creation is a necessity, that in truth she scarcely needed human response, and that when men were silent God replied.
Miss Sheppard's style was something very novel. Based, perhaps, on an admiration of one whose later exploits have dwarfed his earlier in the general estimation, there was yet no more resemblance than between the string-courses of a building and its sculptured friezes. Indeed, writing was not her virtual expression: this may be learned even in her peculiar way of loving Nature, for it was not so much Nature itself as Nature's effects that she prized; and between the work now performed and that awaiting her in some further life one feels the difference that exists between the soft clay model with its mild majesty, its power clogged and covered, and the same when it issues in the white radiance of marble. She does not seem to have been an extensive reader, and certainly no student, while she totally disregarded all rules and revision. Her sentences were so long that one got lost in them, and had finally to go back and clutch a nominative case and drag it down the page with him; there were ambiguities and obscurities in plenty: her thoughts were so bright that they darkened her words; one must go through a process of initiation,—but having mastered the style, one knew the writer. It was well worth while, this shrouding rhetoric, for beneath it were no reserves; superficially no one ever kept more out of sight, but the real reader could not fail to know that here he had the freedom of the author's nature: and although she somewhere said that a woman "thus intensely feminine, thus proud and modest, betraying herself to the world in her writings, is an exception, and one in the whole world the most rare," she knew not that she sketched herself in that exception. But there are not elsewhere to be found pages so drenched with beauty as hers; and for all her vague abstractions of language, and wide, suffused effects, she possessed yet the skill to present a picture, keenly etched and vividly colored, in the fewest words, when she chose. Not to mention Rose and Bernard, who, oddly enough, are a series of the most exquisite pictures in themselves, bathed in changing and ever-living light, let us take, for instance, Maria Cerinthia walking in the streets of Paris, having worn out her mantilla, and with only a wreath of ivy on her head,—or Clotilda at her books, "looking very much like an old picture of a young person sitting there,"—or the charming one of Laura's pas, which the little boy afterwards describes in saying, "She quite swam, and turned her eyes upward,"—or, better, yet, that portrait of a Romagnese woman: "of the ancient Roman beauty, rare now, if still remembered, with hair to her knees, wrapping her form in a veil vivid as woven gold, with the emerald eyes of Dante's Beatrice, a skin of yellow whiteness, and that mould of figure in which undulating softness quenches majesty,—the mould of the mystical Lucretia." There are sea-sketches scattered among these leaves which no painter's brush will ever equal, and morning and twilight gain new splendor and tenderness beneath her touch.
But, after all, this was not her style's chief excellence; she cared little for such pictorial achievements, and in presenting her fancies she often sacrificed outline to melody; it is necessary for you to feel rather than to see her meaning. What distinguished her yet more was the ability by means of this style to interpret music into words. Although this may not be correct practice, there was never a musical critic who did not now and then attempt it: musicians themselves never do, because music is to them nothing to see or to describe, but the air they breathe, and in fact a state of being. Do you remember that tone-wreath of heather and honeysuckle? "It was a movement of such intense meaning that it was but one sigh of unblended and unfaltering melody isolated as the fragrance of a single flower, and only the perfumes of Nature exhale a bliss as sweet, how far more unexpressed! This short movement, that in its oneness was complete, grew, as it were, by fragmentary harmonies, intricate, but most gradual, into another,—a prestissimo so delicately fitful that it was like moonlight dancing upon crested ripples; or, for a better similitude, like quivering sprays in a summer wind. And in less than fifty bars of regularly broken time—how ravishingly sweet I say not—the first subject in refrain flowed through the second, and they, interwoven even as creepers and flowers densely tangled, closed together simultaneously." And if you have not the book by you, will you pardon another,—the awful and eternal flow of the Mer de Glace?
"At first awoke the strange, smooth wind-notes of the opening adagio; the fetterless chains of ice seemed to close around my heart. The movement had no blandness in its solemnity; and so still and shiftless was the grouping of the harmonies, that a frigidity, actual as well as ideal, passed over my pores and hushed my pulses. After a hundred such tense yet clinging chords, the sustaining calm was illustrated, not broken, by a serpentine phrase of one lone oboë, pianissimo over the piano-surface, which it crisped not, but on and above which it breathed like the track of a sunbeam aslant from a parted cloud. The slightest possible retardation at its close brought us to the refrain of the simple adagio, interrupted again by a rush of violoncello-notes, rapid and low, like some sudden under-current striving to burst through the frozen sweetness. Then spread wide the subject, as plains upon plains of water-land; though the time was gradually increased. Amplifications of the same harmonies introduced a fresh accession of violoncelli and oboi contrasted artfully in syncopation, till at length the strides of the accelerando gave a glittering precipitation to the entrance of the second and longest movement.
"Then Anastase turned upon me, and with the first bar we fell into a tumultuous presto. Far beyond all power to analyze as it was just then, the complete idea embraced me as instantaneously as had the picturesque chillness of the first. I have called it tumultuous,—but merely in respect of rhythm:—the harmonies were as clear and evolved as the modulation itself was sharp, keen, and unapproachable. Through every bar reigned that vividly enunciated ideal, whose expression pertains to the one will alone in any age,—the ideal, that, binding together in suggestive imagery every form of beauty, symbolizes and represents something beyond them all.
"Here over the surge-like, but fast-bound motivo—only like those tost ice-waves, dead still in their heaped-up crests—were certain swelling crescendos of a second subject, so unutterably if vaguely sweet, that the souls of all deep blue Alp-flowers, the clarity of all high blue skies, had surely passed into them, and was passing from them again….
"It was not until the very submerging climax that the playing of Anastase was recalled to me. Then, amidst long ringing notes of the wild horns, and intermittent sighs of the milder wood, swept from the violins a torrent of coruscant arpeggi, and above them all I heard his tone, keen but solvent, as his bow seemed to divide the very strings with fire, and I felt as if some spark had fallen upon my fingers to kindle mine. As soon as it was over, I looked up and laughed in his face with sheer pleasure."
Nothing of the kind was ever half so delightful, if one excepts Mr. Dwight's translation of a Gondel-lied. As literal description it is wondrous, but as imagination it equals the music itself. Let us pause for an instant here and recall the singular inventive and combining grace with which a Spectacle is always given in these stories. It is well known that Mendelssohn contemplated an opera upon the "Tempest," although he did not live to execute the idea; but how charmingly is that taken and mingled with what he had already done in the "Midsummer-Night's Dream," at the festival of the Silver Wedding, when the lonely tones from age to age frozen on the cups of lilies, the orbed harmonies bound burning within the roses, the dreaming song thrilled along the veins of violets, intricate sounds hushed under green gloom of myrtle-leaves, mourning chords with which the cedars stood charged,—were all disenchanted and stole forth on longing wind-instruments and on the splendor of violins, "accumulating in orchestral richness, as if flower after flower of music were unsheathing to the sun"!
Yet the unlovely is not to be found within these covers: there was a quality in the writer's mind like that fervid, all-vivifying sunshine which so illumines the cities of the desert, so steeps the pavements, so soaks through the pores of solids, so sharpens angles and softens curves, as Fromentin tells us, that even squalor borrows brilliant dyes, and rags and filth lighten into picturesque and burnished glory. And this is well for the reader, as all have not time for philosophy, nor can all transmute pain into treasure. But for her, sweet sounds and sights abound in everything; bird and breeze and bee alike are winged with melody; the music of the sea satisfies her heart, and there "the artist-ear,—which makes a spectrum for all sounds that are not separate, distinguishes the self-same harmonies that govern the gradations of the orchestra, from deep to deep descending, until sounds are lost in sound as lights in light";—the trains have their thunderous music in her hearing; and the bells to which Cecilia listens seem to be ringing in the last day:—"The ravishing and awful sound of them, which is only heard by the few,—the passion in their rise and fall,—their wavering,—their rushing fulness,—drew off all consciousness: most like the latest and last passion,—the passion of death."
There seems to be no subject which this woman has not pondered deeply. Her theory of Temperament is an attendant fairy that does marvellous things for her, and not only apportions natures, but corresponding bodies, so that we can easily see how the golden age is to return again, when peradventure deceits shall be impossible, and all the virtues thrive by mere necessity under the reign of this perfected Science of the Soul. Yet, roam where she would, there were always two mysteries that allured her back again, as Thoné's curt sentence told,—"Tonkunst und Arzenei"; and to these might be added Race, in defiance of Mr. Buckle. Assuredly the Hebrew owes acknowledgment to her, and not George Borrow, with all his weird learning, enters more deeply into the Burden of Egypt; Browning's appreciation of the gypsy standing alone beside hers,—Browning, between whose writings and her own a rich sympathy exists, both being so possessed of fulness. Yet verse could not chain her wide eloquence in its fetters; and whenever she attempted it, its music made her thought shapeless. There is one exception to this, however, and we give it below,—for, inartistic as this mould may seem, and amorphous as its ideas may be, it is the only instance of any rhymes fully translating the meaning of music, and it is as full of clinging pathos and melody as the great creation it paraphrases, and to which no words will quite respond.
"In gardens where the languid roses keep
Perpetual sweetness for the hearts that smile,
Perpetual sadness for the hearts that weep,
Lonely, unseen, I wander, to beguile
The day that only shines to show thee bright,
The night whose stars burn wan beside thy light,
Adelaïda!
"Adelaïda! all the birds are singing
Low, as thou passest, where in leaves they lie;
With timid chirp unto their soft mates clinging,
They greet that presence without which they die,—
Die, even with Nature's universal heart,
When thou, her queen, dost in thy pride depart,
Adelaïda!
"Depart! and dim her beauty evermore;
Go, from the shivering leaves and lily-flowers,
That, white as saints on the eternal shore,
Stand wavering, beckoning, in the moony bowers,—
Beckon me on where their moist feet are laid
In the dark mould, fast by the alder-shade,
Adelaïda!
"Adelaïda! 'tis the Grave or Love
Must fight for this great first, last mastery.
I feed in faith on spicy gales above,
Where all along that blue unchanging sky
Thy name is traced;—its sweetness never fails
To sound in streams of peace in spicy gales,
Adelaïda!
"Adelaïda! woe is me, woe, woe!
Not only in the sky, in starry gold,
I see thy name,—where peaceful rivers flow,
Not only hear its sweetness manifold;
On every white and purple flower 'tis written,
Its echo every aspen-quake hath smitten,
Adelaïda!
"Go farther! let me leave thee! I depart!—
Who whispered I would linger by thy side?
Who said it beat so warm, my feeble heart?
Who told, I dared to claim thee as my bride?
Who cried, I roamed without thee all the day
And clasped thee in my dreams? Away, away,
Adelaïda!
"I die, but thou shall live; in the loud noon
Thy feet shall crush the long grass o'er my head,
Not rudely, rudely,—gently, gently, soon
Shall tread me heavier down in that dark bed;
And thou shalt know not on whose head they pass,
Whose silent hands, whose frozen heart!—Alas,
Adelaïda!"
There are those who in "Charles Auchester," charmed by the simplicity and truth of that first part called "Choral Life," objected to the rest on the score of extravagance. But this book records the adoration of music, and in an age replete with the dilettanti of indifference may we not thank God for one enthusiast? Yet, indeed, everything about Mendelssohn was itself extravagant,—his childhood, his youth, his life, his beauty, his power: should the instrument, then, be tuned lower than such key-note? And again, to us who live a somewhat commonplace routine, the life of musical artists, especially abroad, must necessarily seem redundant; yet it is only that life, natural and actual, into which we are here inducted. The same is possible to no other class of artists: even the scholar, buried in his profound studies, must descend from his abstraction; the poet, the painter, cannot share it: for the latter, however much he clubs and cliques, is seldom sufficiently dispossessed of himself; and the other, though he strike out of his heat poems as immortal as stars, may yet live among clods and feel no thrill returning on himself. But the musician cannot dwell alone: his art requires that he should cluster, and the orchestra enforces it; therefore he acts and reacts like the vibrations ridged within a Stradivarius, he is kept in his art's atmosphere till it becomes his life, its aura bathes every trivial thing, and existence which might otherwise be meagre is raised and glorified. Thus yet more, when we recall that even were the musician's life not so, still it ought to be, and it is the right of the author to idealize, one can believe "Charles Auchester" to be but a faithful transcript. "In proportion to our appreciation of music is also our appreciation of what is not music," Sarona says; and so faithfully does this writer prove it, by her attention to minute and usual circumstances, that one might certainly allow her some exaltation when touching on one theme,—yet how this exaltation can be called in question by any who espouse Bettine von Arnim's sublime ravings the morning after entering Vienna is mysterious. Were the real condition of these natures—which certainly exist—bared to view, many from their phlegmatic experience might deem all the nerves to be in a state of excitation, when in fact they saw only normal and healthy play. It is true that the power of modulated tones arouses everything most ethereal and lofty in our composition, and it must therefore be wrong to charge with extravagance any description of a life in music, which is a life in the highest, because truly it cannot be extravagant enough, since all words fail before that of which it discourses,—while it gives you the sense of the universe and of the eternities, and is to the other arts what the soul is to the body. And is it not, moreover, the voice of Nature, the murmur of wind and tree, the thrill of all the dropping influences of the heavens, the medium of spiritual communication, the universal language in which all can exchange thought and feeling, and through which the whole world becomes one nation? Out of the spirit blossom spirits, Bettine tells us, and we subject ourselves to their power: "Ah, wonderful mediation of the ineffable, which oppresses the bosom! Ah, music!" To go further, there is certainly no exaggeration in Charles Auchester's treatment of his hero; for, reading the contemporaneous articles of musical journals, you will find them one and all speaking in even more unrestrained profligacy of praise, recognizing in the cloud of composers but nine worthy the name of Master, of whom Mendelssohn was one, and declaring that under his baton the orchestra was electrified. We all remember the solemnly pathetic and passionate beauty of Seraphael's burial by night, with the music winding up among the stars; but did it in reality exceed the actual progress of the dead Master's ashes from city to city, met in the twilight and the evening by music, gray-headed Capellmeisters receiving him with singing in the open midnight, and fresh songs being flung upon his coffin like wreaths with the sunrise?
