This kindling of an old form with our own life is more difficult in the case of music than it is in painting or poetry, for in these we have a concrete form to deal with--a form which reflects the thought with much more definiteness than music is able to do. The strength and weakness, at once, of music is that it gives expression to subtler regions of thought and feeling than the other arts, at the same time that the form is more evanescent, because fashioned out of elements infinitely less related to nature than those of other art forms. In his poems on music, the poet always emphasizes these aspects of music. Its supremacy as a means of giving expression to the subtlest regions of feeling is dwelt upon in "Abt Vogler" and "Fifine at the Fair." The Abbé, from the standpoint of the creator of music, feels so strongly from the inside its power for expressing infinite aspiration that in his ecstasy he exclaims: "The rest may reason and welcome. 'Tis we musicians know." Upon the evanescence of the form peculiar emphasis is also laid in this poem, through the fact that the music is improvised. Yet even this fact does not mean the entire annihilation of the form. In the tenth stanza of the poem the idea of the permanence of the art form as well as of the feeling is expanded into a symbol of the immortality of all good: "All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist; Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist When eternity confirms the conception of an hour, The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by." The sophistical arguer in "Fifine" feels this same power of music to express thoughts not to be made palpable in any other manner. "Words struggle with the weight So feebly of the False, thick element between Our soul, the True, and Truth! which, but that intervene False shows of things, were reached as easily by thought Reducible to word, and now by yearnings wrought Up with thy fine free force, oh Music, that canst thrill, Electrically win a passage through the lid Of earthly sepulchre, our words may push against, Hardly transpierce as thou." And again, in another passage, he gives to music the power of conserving a mood of feeling, which in this case is not an exalted one, since it is one that chimes in with his own rather questionable feeling for Fifine, the fiz-gig. It is found in Schumann's "Carnival":