organic world, seem to appeal to the subtlest fibres of our nature; they go to the very depths of the heart.  When I spoke of the gloomy hue, and the coldness of the tones in the introduction to Mose, was I not fully as much justified as your critics are when they speak of the ‘color’ in a writer’s language?  Do you not acknowledge that there is a nervous style, a pallid style, a lively, and a highly-colored style?  Art can paint with words, sounds, colors, lines, form; the means are many; the result is one.

“An Italian architect might give us the same sensation that is produced in us by the introduction to Mose, by constructing a walk through dark, damp avenues of tall, thick trees, and bringing us out suddenly in a valley full of streams, flowers, and mills, and basking in the sunshine.  In their greatest moments the arts are but the expression of the grand scenes of nature.

“I am not learned enough to enlarge on the philosophy of music; go and talk to Capraja; you will be amazed at what he can tell you.  He will say that every instrument that depends on the touch or breath of man for its expression and length of note, is superior as a vehicle of expression to color, which remains fixed, or speech, which has its limits.  The language of music is infinite; it includes everything; it can express all things.

“Now do you see wherein lies the pre-eminence of the work you have just heard?  I can explain it in a few words.  There are two kinds of music:  one, petty, poor, second-rate, always the same, based on a hundred or so of phrases which every musician has at his command, a more or less agreeable form of babble which most composers live in.  We listen to their strains, their would-be melodies, with more or less satisfaction, but absolutely nothing is left in our mind; by the end of the century they are forgotten.  But the nations, from the beginning of time till our own day, have cherished as a precious treasure certain strains which epitomize their instincts and habits; I might almost say their history.  Listen to one of these primitive tones,—­the Gregorian chant, for instance, is, in sacred song, the inheritance of the earliest peoples,—­and you will lose yourself in deep dreaming.  Strange and immense conceptions will unfold within you, in spite of the extreme simplicity of these rudimentary relics.  And once or twice in a century—­not oftener, there arises a Homer of music, to whom God grants the gift of being ahead of his age; men who can compact melodies full of accomplished facts, pregnant with mighty poetry.  Think of this; remember it.  The thought, repeated by you, will prove fruitful; it is melody, not harmony, that can survive the shocks of time.

“The music of this oratorio contains a whole world of great and sacred things.  A work which begins with that introduction and ends with that prayer is immortal—­as immortal as the Easter hymn, O filii et filioe, as the Dies iroe of the dead, as all the songs which in every land have outlived its splendor, its happiness, and its ruined prosperity.”