and made them subservient to his will.  And the “slaves of the sound,” whom he has conjured up, have built him a palace more evanescent than Solomon’s, but, as he describes it, far more beautiful.  They have laid its foundations below the earth.  They have carried its transparent walls up to the sky.  They have tipped each summit with meteoric fire.  As earth strove upwards towards Heaven, Heaven, in this enchanted structure, has yearned downwards towards the earth.  The great Dead came back; and those conceived for a happier future walked before their time.  New births of life and splendour united far and near; the past, the present, and the to-come.

The vision has disappeared with the sounds which called it forth, and the musician feels sorrowfully that it cannot be recalled:  for the effect was incommensurate with the cause; they had nothing in common with each other.  We can trace the processes of painting and verse; we can explain their results.  Art, however triumphant, is subject to natural laws.  But that which frames out of three notes of music “not a fourth sound, but a star” is the Will, which is above law.

And, therefore, so Abt Vogler consoles himself, the music persists, though it has passed from the sense of him who called it forth:  for it is an echo of the eternal life; a pledge of the reality of every imagined good—­of the continuance of whatever good has existed.  Human passion and aspiration are music sent up to Heaven, to be continued and completed there.  The secret of the scheme of creation is in the musician’s hands.

Having recognized this, Abt Vogler can subside, proudly and patiently, on the common chord—­the commonplace realities, of life.

“PICTOR IGNOTUS” (Florence, 15—­), is the answer of an unknown painter to the praise which he hears lavished on another man.  He admits its justice, but declares that he too could have deserved it; and his words have all the bitterness of a suppressed longing which an unexpected touch has set free.  He, too, has dreamed of fame; and felt no limits to his power of attaining it.  But he saw, by some flash of intuition, that it must be bought by the dishonour of his works; that, in order to bring him fame, they must descend into the market, they must pass from hand to hand; they must endure the shallowness of their purchasers’ comments, share in the pettiness of their lives.  He has remained obscure, that his creations might be guarded against this sacrilege.  “He paints Madonnas and saints in the twilight stillness of the cloister and the aisle; and if his heart saddens at the endless repetition of the one heavenward gaze, at least no merchant traffics in what he loves.  There, where his pictures have been born, mouldering in the dampness of the wall, blackening in the smoke of the altar, amidst a silence broken only by prayer, they may ‘gently’ and ‘surely’ die.”  He asks himself, as he again subsides into mournful resignation, whether the applause of men may not be neutralized at its best by the ignoble circumstances which it entails.