I have already referred to the manner in which Weber, while composing certain parts of the "Freischuetz," got his imagination into the proper state of creative frenzy by picturing to himself his bride as if she were singing new arias for him. Now, in one of Wagner's essays there is a curious passage which seems to indicate that Wagner habitually conjured his characters before his mental vision and made them sing to him, as it were, his original melodies. He advises a young composer who wishes to follow his example never to select a dramatic character for whom he does not entertain a warm interest. "He should divest him of all theatrical apparel," he continues, "and then imagine him in a dim light, where he can only see the expression of his eyes. If these speak to him, the figure itself is liable presently to make a movement, which will perhaps alarm him--but to which he must submit; at last the phantom's lips tremble, it opens its mouth, and a supernatural voice tells him something that is entirely real, entirely tangible, but at the same time so extraordinary (similar, for instance, to what the ghostly statue, or the page _Cherubin_ told Mozart) that it arouses him from his dream. The vision has disappeared; but his inner ear continues to hear; an idea has occurred to him, and this idea is a so-called musical _motive_." As this passage implies, and as he has elsewhere explained at length, Wagner looked on the mental process of composing as something analogous to dreaming--as a sort of clairvoyance, which enables a musician to dive down into the bottomless mysteries of the universe, as it were, thence to bring up his priceless pearls of harmony. According to the Kant-Schopenhauer philosophy, of which Wagner was a disciple, objects or things in themselves do not exist in space and time, which are mere forms under which the human mind beholds them. We cannot conceive anything except as existing either in space or in time. But there is one exception, according to Wagner, and that is harmony. Harmony exists not in time, for the time-element in music is melody; nor does it exist in space, for the simultaneousness of tones is not one of extension or space. Hence our harmonic sense is not hampered by the forms of the mind, but gives us a glimpse of things as they are in themselves--a glimpse of the world as a superior spirit would behold it. And hence the mysterious superterrestrial character of such new harmonies as we find in the works of Wagner and Chopin--which are unintelligible to ordinary mortals, while to the initiated they come as revelations of a new world.