but his gliding and crossing fingers, so soon as they have struck the first chord, become the most sensitive agents of an emotional soul. Under Risler’s treatment the commonplace becomes a novelty. Out of Liszt’s sermon of St Francis to the birds he draws the last poetical breath; Beethoven he bathes in a warm brilliancy of his own; and, not to be charged with too much sweetness, he flings himself loose with the overture to the Meistersinger, so that we fancy the whole orchestra to be playing, and we have an assurance that it is not weakness, but an active artistic restraint which gives to his touch its never-to-be-forgotten delicate profundity. [Illustration] Piano-playing, in such an unparalleled advance, became of necessity a profession, which at one time enticed to deceive, at another rewarded abundantly. It is a profession which on one side leads to royal wealth, on the other to that extreme of misery which is the half of all art. The collision, which in our age is inevitable between industry and art, revealed the terrible abysses which yawn between the claims of a profession and those of art. While in a Frankfort paper we can read advertisements in which a young lady teacher offers two piano lessons a week in return for the daily four o’clock coffee with the family, young Hofmann, at nine years of age, gave, in New York alone, within three months, thirty-five recitals, from which his impresario, out of a gross receipt of over twenty-five thousand pounds, took at least ten thousand for himself. [Illustration: Madame Carreño.]