are endless, being, as the Abbé Lamennais tells us, to man what creation is to God; and music may safely be trusted to develop in such a way as to ever be the most fitting expression of the inarticulate cravings and aspirations of the human soul. Wagner has attempted to unite the three arts of Painting, Poetry, and Music: and of his work a competent judge has written--"The musical drama is undoubtedly the highest manifestation of which men are capable. All the most refined arts are called in to contribute to the idea. The author of a musical drama is no more a musician, or a poet, or a painter; he is the supreme _artist_, not fettered by the limits of one art, but able to step over the boundaries of all the different branches of æsthetic composition, and find the proper means for rendering his thought wherever he wants it. This was Wagner's aim. His latter works, 'Tristram and Isolde,' the 'Niebelungen Ring,' and 'Parsifal,' are the actuation of the theory, or at least are works showing what is the way towards the aim." Another eminent critic, Mr. Walter Pater, writing upon the fine arts, tells us that "_All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music_.... It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of form and matter. In its ideal consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire. Music, then, and not poetry, as is so often supposed, is the true type or measure of consummate art. Therefore, although each art has its incommunicable element, its untranslatable order of impressions, its unique mode of reaching the 'imaginative reason,' yet the arts may be represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone completely realises." We may rest assured--as assured as Emerson or Matthew Arnold concerning the illimitable possibilities of poetry--that the future has great riches in store for all lovers of music. Giants, indeed, are they who are no longer among us, but it is not derogatory to these great ones to believe and hope that--life being "moving music" according to the definition of the Syrian Gnostics--the world will yet be electrified by the genius of successors worthy of such royal ancestry as Handel and Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. ELIZABETH A. SHARP. FOOTNOTE: [A] Hawkin's _Musical History_, vol. iii., p. 441. [Decoration] [Decoration] THE GREAT COMPOSERS. [GERMAN.] _BACH._ I.