and to strengthen myself through him.” Along with Bach was mingled in his mind the author Hoffmann. There was a remarkable elective affinity in the sympathies of his nature. The “profoundly-combining” Bach took the place of Jean Paul, and the story-teller Hoffmann took the place of Schubert. The twists and turns of a writer, whose style might be called “contrapuntal,” found their continuation in the musician who brought all counterpoint into a wonderful “incommensurable” harmony; and the popular simplicity of a musician found its complement in the dreamy lyricism of a genius who had formed perhaps a more beautiful anticipation of the whole music of our century than its actual state has realised. This poet, himself a musician, valued the most romantic of all arts, “one might almost say, the only genuine romantic art; for its subject-matter is the eternal: music opens to man an unknown realm which has nothing in common with the external world of sense, and in which he leaves behind all defined feelings in order to give himself up to an inexpressible longing.” And the poet leads us into a realm of magic. In the “Kreisleriana,” the garden into which the author leads us is full of tone and song. The stranger comes up to the young squire and tells him of many distant and unknown lands, and strange men and animals; and his speech dies away into a wonderful tone, in which he expresses unknown and mysterious things, intelligibly, yet without words. But the castle maiden follows his enticements, and they meet every midnight at the old tree, none venturing to approach too near the strange melodies that sound therefrom. Then the castle maiden lies pierced through under the tree, and the lute is broken; but from her blood grow mosses of wonderful colour over the stone, and the young Chrysostom hears the nightingale, which since then makes its nest and sings its song in the tree. At home his father is accompanying his old songs on the clavicymbal, and songs, mosses, and castle-maiden, are all fused in his mind into one. In the garden of tone and song all sorts of internal melodies rise in his heart, and the murmur of the words gives them their breath. He tries to set them to the clavier, but they refuse to come forth from their hiding-places. He closes the instrument, and listens to see whether the songs will not now sound forth more clearly and brightly; for--“I knew well that the tones must dwell there as if enchanted.”