But a far stronger point is the power of portraiture.  Seraphael having been identified, people turned their attention to the other cipher.  Disregarding the orchestral similitude of sound in his name, which, by the way, nobody pronounces as Aronach instructed, they chose to infer that Charles Auchester himself was the Herr Joachim, that Starwood Burney stood for Sterndale Bennett, that Diamid Albany meant Disraeli, that Zelter figured as Aronach, and that Jenny Lind, of whom Mendelssohn himself said there would not in a whole century be born another being so gifted, and whom the Italians, those lovers of fair pseudonymes, called “La Benedetta,” is no other than Clara Benette.  But these are trivial, compared with Rodomant and Porphyro.  It was daring enough, when Beckendorf mimicked Prince Metternich; but to undertake and to contrast Louis Napoleon and Beethoven, without belittling either, pales every other performance.  They tower before us grand and immutable as if cast in bronze, and so veritable that they throw shadows; the prison-gloom is sealed on Porphyro’s face,—­power and purpose indomitable; just as the “gruesome Emperor” is to-day, we find him in that book,—­dark in the midst of his glory, as enduring as a Ninevite sculpture, strong and inscrutable as the Sphinx.  But his heights topple over with this world’s decline, while the other builds for the eternal aeons.  Rodomant,—­did one fail to find his identity, they would yet recognize him in those old prints, the listening head bent forwards, the features like discords melting info chords; it is hard to tell how such strength was given in such slight sentences,—­but from the time when he contemptuously tossed out his tune-fooleries, through the hour when with moonlight fancies “a serene ecstatic serenade was rippling silently beneath his pen,” to that when the organ burst upon his ear in thunders quenchless and everlasting as the sea’s, he is still Beethoven, gigantic in pride, purity, and passion.  “I dream now,” said Rodomant; “like the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters, so stir my shadows, dim shapes of sound, across the chaos of my fathomless intention.”  This “Rumour” has never been reprinted in America; it will, then, be excusable to give here a scene which Is indeed its climax.

“A spiritual nature has for its highest and hardest temptation a disposition to outrage, precedent,—­sometimes propriety.  It is sure of itself—­very likely—­but it may endanger the machinery, moral or tangible, which it employs for agent.  Again, who has not dreamed of a dream? who has not remembered dimly what yet experience contradicts? who does not confound fact and imagination, to the damage of his reputation for truth?