“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.”