“In the course of the evening I was introduced to the nephew of my host, a low-browed youth, with a keen grey eye, and a look of habitual cunning, but poorly concealed under a manner of assumed frankness. Months, nay, two years passed away, and found me still attending at the house. My prospects were much improved. I had many pupils, and the few things I had published were highly spoken of. Those years were passed in a state of intoxicating delight. I lived but for her; it was her image that inspired me when I wrote; it was ever before me, and formed at once my blessing and my bane. When I thought of the immense distance which wealth had placed between us, I felt how utterly hopeless was my love—and I was wretched. Then it was that music came to my aid. I would sit for hours at my piano, and in its harmony forget all else beside. While there, what are to me the pomp and luxury of the rich and great? What to me their parties and their feastings? Do they enjoy for one moment the blissful rapture which fills my heart then? Do they revel in rapture, purged of all earthly grossness? These are the remunerating moments of a musician’s wretched life. The soul seems floating in an atmosphere of delicious harmony; a sad but pleasing melancholy comes on; a grateful languor falls upon his heart, and softens it to happiness. How indefinable those feelings; the emotions then felt have no sympathy with things that be; the present has no connection with it; it is like the dream of some dim, far-off land of beauty, the mortal eye never saw, but with which the memory of the soul seems charged. I cannot word the feeling—it is nameless.”