What a fulness of the noblest, the sublimest conceptions must have lived and moved in him to admit of their crystallizing themselves into the melodies which transport us!--softness without weakness, enthusiasm without hollowness, longing without sentimentality, passion without madness. He is deep but never turgid, pleasant but never insipid, lofty but never bombastic. In the expression of love, fervent, tender, overflowing with happiness or with melancholy, but never with ignoble sensuality. He can be cordial, cheerful, joyful to extravagance, to excess--never to vulgarity. In the deepest suffering he does not lose himself--he triumphs over it. He has been called humorous--it is a question whether music, viewed in its immediateness and truth, be capable of expressing humour--yet it may be that he sometimes "smiles amid tears." With true majesty does he move in his power, in his loftiness, in the boldness of his action, which may rise to defiance--never to senseless licence. A little self-will shows itself here and there, but it suits him well, for it is not the self-will of obstinacy, but of striving. He can be pious, never hypocritical; his lofty soul rises to the Unspeakable; he falls on his knees with humility, but not with slavish fear, for he feels the divinity within. A trace of heroic freedom pervades all his creations, consequently they work in the cause of freedom. The expression, "_Im Freien_"--liberty! might serve as the inscription on a temple dedicated to his genius! Like Nature herself, he is varied in his forms, without ever relinquishing a deep-laid, well-concerted basis; he is rich in the melodies which he produces, but never lavish; he acts in regard to them with a wise economy. In the working out of his thoughts he unites the soundest musical logic to the richest inventive boldness. Seldom only does he forget the words of Schiller,--"In what he leaves _unsaid_, I discover the master of style." This wise economy does not forsake him either in the selection or the number of the organs which he employs. He avoids every superfluity, but the spirits of sound which he invokes must obey him. Nevertheless, not to slavish servitude does he reduce them; on the contrary, he raises them in their own estimation by that which he exacts from them. What might be urged against him, perhaps, is that he sometimes makes demands upon them to which they are not adequate, that his ideal conception goes beyond their power of execution. He has spoken almost exclusively in the highest forms of instrumental music, and where, in one way or other, words are added to these, he has always been actuated by high motive. He sings of Love and Freedom with Goethe, of Joy with Schiller, of the heroism of Conjugal Love in "Fidelio;" in his solemn Mass he gives expression to all those feelings which force their way from man to his Maker.