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 oboe, 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....