It is here that this second phase of Meyerbeer's remarkably active and productive career will come to a close. We may be sure that he had already felt a desire to work for the French stage, whither the very nature of his powerful and profoundly dramatic genius seemed to call him. We are now to see him direct his efforts towards this end, preparing himself for the change by his last Italian work, written in a more elevated, loftier strain than the preceding ones, and which seemed to indicate on his part a fixed determination to create another distinct manner. In order to attain this third and last manner, ingrafted, as it were, on the two preceding ones, it was necessary for him to adopt a method analogous to the one which he had used on arriving in Italy. Just as he had to abandon, on touching foot to Italian soil, everything in his style which might appear too scholastic, heavy and formal, so, in going to France, he was obliged to lay aside the affected elegance, frivolous grace and superficial language of the Italian forms. He endeavored to retain and combine the best elements in the various schools,--to unite the melodic sentiment of Italy to the harmonic richness of Germany, and to join to these the picturesque coloring, the passionate ardor, and above all the sense of dramatic truth which are the characteristic qualities of the French musical school. It was then, after he had transformed his style by this fusion of three different but not antagonistic elements, the union of which must form a harmonious and well balanced whole, after he had become master both of his thought and of the idea which should clothe it, it was then that he found himself in full possession of himself and of his genius and that he became the great man whose name was universally known and whose works everywhere challenged admiration.