“Then were heard melodies such as the nightingale pours forth in the gloaming when the perfume of the rose intoxicates her heart with sweet forebodings of spring!  What melting, sensuously languishing notes of bliss!  Tones that kissed, then poutingly fled from another, and at last embraced and became one, and died away in the ecstasy of union!  Again, there were heard sounds like the song of the fallen angels, who, banished from the realms of bliss, sink with shame-red countenance to the lower world.  These were sounds out of whose bottomless depth gleamed no ray of hope or comfort; when the blessed in heaven hear them, the praises of God die away upon their pallid lips, and, sighing, they veil their holy faces.”  Leigh Hunt, in one of his essays, thus describes the playing of this greatest of all virtuosos:  “Paganini, the first time I saw and heard him, and the first moment he struck a note, seemed literally to strike it, to give it a blow.  The house was so crammed that, being among the squeezers in the standing room at the side of the pit, I happened to catch the first glance of his face through the arms akimbo of a man who was perched up before me, which made a kind of frame for it; and there on the stage through that frame, as through a perspective glass, were the face, the bust, and the raised hand of the wonderful musician, with the instrument at his chin, just going to begin, and looking exactly as I describe him in the following lines: 

    “His hand, Loading the air with dumb expectancy,
     Suspended, ere it fell, a nation’s breath. 
     He smote; and clinging to the serious chords
     With Godlike ravishment drew forth a breath,
     So deep, so strong, so fervid, thick with love—­
     Blissful, yet laden as with twenty prayers—­
     That Juno yearned with no diviner soul
     To the first burthen of the lips of Jove. 
     The exceeding mystery of the loveliness
     Sadden’d delight; and, with his mournful look,
     Dreary and gaunt, hanging his pallid face
     Twixt his dark flowing locks, he almost seemed
     Too feeble, or to melancholy eyes
     One that has parted from his soul for pride,
     And in the sable secret lived forlorn.

“To show the depth and identicalness of the impression which he made on everybody, foreign or native, an Italian who stood near me said to himself, with a long sigh, ‘O Dio!’ and this had not been said long, when another person in the same tone uttered ‘Oh Christ!’ Musicians pressed forward from behind the scenes to get as close to him as possible, and they could not sleep at night for thinking of him.”