As first awoke the strange, smooth wind-notes of the opening _adagio_, the fetterless chains of ice seemed to close around my heart. The movement had no blandness in its solemnity, and so still and shiftless was the grouping of the harmonies that a frigidity actual, as well as ideal, passed over my pores and hushed my pulses. After a hundred such tense, yet clinging chords, the sustaining calm was illustrated, not broken, by a serpentine phrase of one lone oboe, _pianissimo_ over the _piano_ surface, which it crisped not, but on and above which it breathed like the track of a sunbeam aslant from a parted cloud. The slightest possible retardation at its close brought us to the refrain of the simple _adagio_, interrupted again by a rush of violoncello notes, rapid and low, like some sudden under-current striving to burst through the frozen sweetness. Then spread wide the subject as plains upon plains of _water-land_, though the time was gradually increased. Amplifications of the same harmonies introduced a fresh accession of violoncelli, and oboi contrasted artfully in syncopation, till at length the strides of the _accelerando_ gave a glittering precipitation to the entrance of the second and longest movement. Then Anastase turned upon me, and with the first bar we fell into a tumultuous _presto_. Far beyond all power to analyze as it was just then, the complete idea embraced me as instantaneously as had the picturesque chilliness of the first. I have called it tumultuous, but merely in respect of rhythm; the harmonies were as clear and evolved as the modulation itself was sharp, keen, unanticipated, unapproachable. Through every bar reigned that vividly enunciated ideal, whose expression pertains to the one will alone in any age,--the ideal that, binding together in suggestive imagery every form of beauty, symbolizes and represents something beyond them all. Here over the surge-like, but fast-bound _motivo_--only like those tossed ice-waves, dead still in their heaped-up crests--were certain swelling _crescendos_ of a second subject, so unutterably, if vaguely, sweet that the souls of all deep blue Alp-flowers, the clarity of all high blue skies, had surely passed into them, and was passing from them again. Scarcely is it legitimate to describe what so speaks for itself as music; yet there are assuredly effects produced by music which may be treated of to the satisfaction of the initiated.