Stamitz--after a dramatic plan which not every conductor marks out for himself--gradually descended from the ears into the heart, and from allegros to adagios: this great composer sweeps in ever-narrowing circles around every bosom in which there is a heart, until at last he reaches it and folds it in a rapturous embrace. Horion trembled alone, without seeing his loved ones, in a gloomy arbor, upon which a single withered twig let in the light of the moon and of its pursuing clouds. Nothing ever stirred him more during music than to look at the chase of the clouds. When he accompanied with his eyes and with the tones these nebulous streams in their everlasting flight around our shadowy globe, and when he imparted to them all his joys and his wishes, then he thought, as in all his joys and sorrows, on other clouds, of another flight, of other shadows, than those above him,--then did his whole soul pine and languish; but the strings stilled the panting bosom, as the cold leaden bullet in, the mouth allays thirst, and the tones discharged the heavy tears from the full soul. Dear Victor! there is in man a mighty wish which was never fulfilled: it has no name, it seeks its object, though all that thou namest it and all joys are not its reality; but it recurs, when in a summer night thou lookest to the north or towards distant mountains, or when moonlight is on the earth, or the heavens are studded with stars, or when thou art very happy. This great, vast wish lifts our soul aloft, but with sorrow: ah! here below we are thrown upward in a prostrate position like epileptics. But this wish, to which nothing can give a name,--our strings and tones name it to the human spirit; the yearning soul then weeps more profusely and can no longer comprehend itself, and calls inward in rapture of lamentation between the tones: "Ay, all that ye name to me is what I want!" ... Mortal man, the enigmatical creature, has also a nameless, monstrous dread, which has no object, which awakes at hearing of spiritual apparitions, and which one sometimes feels when one only speaks of it.... Horion yielded up his bruised heart, with quiet tears which no one saw flow, to the high adagios which laid themselves with warm wings of eider-down over all his wounds. All that he loved entered now into his shady arbor,--his oldest friend and his youngest; he hears the thunder-storm-bells of life toll, but the hands of friendship stretch forth to meet each other, and they clasp each other, and even in the second life they hold each other fast in withering grasp. All tones seemed the unearthly echoes of his dream, sent back by beings whom one neither saw nor heard....