full of stars, and in an instant they are thick with gloom; the elements gather into masses, they clash together, and the thunder and the waves fill up the chorus. Then the day dawns softly, and the morning breaks into summer songs. Caves are there and pleasant dells; solitudes are there, dark and lonely; spots beautiful as well as terrible; barren and blasted heaths, where goblins hold their revels; and labyrinthian walks, where sweet-hearts, not unwilling, lose themselves and linger. The earth, the atmosphere, shore, stream, grove, are filled with preternatural movements, with sweet voices and strange sounds. There are Ariel-melodies, there are Caliban groanings; there are the murmurings of manly passions, and the whisperings of maiden-love; there are Bacchanalian jovialities, high and mysterious monologues, fanciful and fairy-ditties, the full swellings of excited hearts, and the choral transports of all nature, made living and made lyrical. But the Prospero who rules in this island, dwells in a lonely cell, and yet commands all the voices of the universe to do his bidding. Have I not, by this analogy, described a grand imaginative composer? Without intending it, I have described Beethoven. I speak, I admit, only as one of the appreciating vulgar—as one of the impressible ignorant; I am able only to express a sensation, not to pronounce a judgment. In listening to Beethoven’s music there is a delight, for which, no doubt, the learned artist can give a reason. I know nothing of art, and with me the listening is an untutored, a wild, an almost savage joy or sorrow, or a mixture of emotions that cannot be defined. The music of Beethoven, if I can judge from the little that I have heard of it, is _unearthly_; but the unearthliness of this music is of a compound nature. Like Spenser’s, Beethoven’s imagination is unearthly; and, like Spenser’s, it is unearthly in the supernaturally grand and beautiful. Like Milton’s imagination, also, Beethoven’s is unearthly; but here it is unearthly in the mysterious and the solemn. The union of these elements in the wholeness of Beethoven’s genius, have given to us that singular, that most original music, which seems to belong to the ideal region, which eastern fancy has peopled with genii and fairies. What a wonderful thing is a symphony of Beethoven’s! But who can describe it, in either its construction or its effects? You might as well attempt to describe, by set phrases, the raptures of St. Paul or the visions of the Apocalypse. It always seems the utterance of a mighty trance, of a mysterious dream, of a solemn ecstacy. The theme, even the most simple—so simple that a child, as it might appear, could have fashioned it, is one, however, that genius of a marvelous peculiarity only could have discovered—a genius that worked and lived amidst the most ideal analogies by which sounds are related to emotions. And this unearthly theme is thrown at