language of a Mozart’s music to prove this;) strong in the faith, against the world, that Joy, Joy is the true condition and true sign of life; but blindly seeking to realize this in the ecstatic lawlessness of love, which necessarily involves sooner or later a proportional reaction of the outraged Law and Wisdom of the Universe. Excessive love of pleasure, helped by a rare magnetism of character, and provoked by the suppressive moralism of the times, have engendered in him a reckless, roving, insatiable appetite, which each intrigue excites and disappoints, until the very passion in which so many souls are first taught the feeling of the Infinite, becomes a fiend in his breast and drives him to a devilish love of power that exults over woman’s ruin, or rather, that does not mind how many hearts and homes fall victims to his unqualified assertion of the everywhere rejected and _snubbed_ faith in Passion. The buoyant impulse, generous and good in the first instance, goes on thus undoubtingly, defying bounds, till it becomes pure willfulness, and the first flush of youth and nobleness is hardening to Satanic features. The beauty and the loveliness of woman have lost to him now all their sacredness; they are mere fuel to the boundless ambition of a passion which knows no delight beyond the brief excitement of intrigue and sensual indulgence. He becomes the impersonation and supernatural genius of one of the holiest springs of human sentiment _perverted_, because _denied_; and he roams the earth a beautiful, terrible, resistless, fallen angel, and victim after victim are quaffed up by his hot breath of all-devouring passion. And so he perseveres until Hell claims its own in the awful consummation of the supper scene. Art could not choose a theme more fraught with meaning and with interest. It is still the old theme and under-current of Opera: the Body and the Soul;[5] the Liberty of passion, unmeet for its own guidance, in conflict with the Law, intensely narrowed down by social custom from God’s great law of universal harmony.