I wonder whether he would understand me!  Melody is the sensuous life of poetry.  Does not the spiritual content of a poem become sensuous feeling through melody?  Do we not in the song of Mignon feel her whole sensuous mood through melody, and does not this sensation incite one in turn to new creations?  Then the spirit longs to expand to boundless universality where everything together forms a channel for the feelings that spring from the simple musical thought and that otherwise would die away unnoted.  This is harmony; this is expressed in my symphonies; the blending of manifold forms rolls on to the goal in a single channel.  At such moments one feels that something eternal, infinite, something that can never be wholly comprehended, lies in all things spiritual; and although I always have the feeling of success in my compositions, yet with the last stroke of the drum with which I have driven home my own enjoyment, my musical conviction, to my hearers, I feel an eternal hunger to begin anew, like a child, what a moment before seemed to me to have been exhausted.

“Speak to Goethe of me; and tell him to hear my symphonies.  Then he will agree with me that music is the sole incorporeal entrance into a higher world of knowledge which, to be sure, embraces man, but which he, on the other hand, can never embrace.  Rhythm of the spirit is necessary to comprehend music in its essence; music imparts presentiments, inspirations of divine science, and what the spirit experiences of the sensuous in it is the embodiment of spiritual knowledge.  Although the spirits live upon music as man lives upon air, it is a very different matter to comprehend it with the spirit.  But the more the soul draws its sensuous nourishment from it, the riper the spirit becomes for a happy mutual understanding.

“But few ever attain this understanding, for just as thousands marry for love and yet love is never once revealed to them, although they all pursue the trade of love, so do thousands hold communion with music and yet do not possess its revelation.  For music also has as its foundation the sublime tokens of the moral sense, just as every art does; every genuine invention indicates moral progress.  To subject oneself to its inscrutable laws, to curb and guide one’s spirit by means of these laws, so that it will pour forth the revelations of music—­this is the isolating principle of art.  To be dissolved by its revelation—­that is the surrender to the divine, which quietly exercises its mastery over the delirium of unbridled forces and thus imparts the greatest efficacy to the imagination.  Thus art always represents divinity, and the human relationship to art constitutes religion.  Whatever we acquire through art comes from God; it is a divine inspiration, which sets up an attainable goal for human capacities.