the stage was the place where our artist felt that he could address, from his inmost heart, his nation and his contemporaries. And what a work we have before us here! There never was a greater contrast between an ideal work of art and the place and occasion to which it owed its origin, than between the _Magic Flute_, one of the starting-points of the most ideal efforts of the German nation, and the audiences of a board booth in a suburb of Vienna! We must, indeed, leave the trivialities and absurdities of the libretto out of consideration. And even here, Mozart’s music succeeded in turning deformity into ideal beauty; and this spite of the fact that the “bird-catcher,” Schikaneder, is said to have suggested many of the melodies to him which have since come into such universal favor. There is still a note of his extant in which we read: “Dear Wolfgang! In the meantime, I return your pa-pa-pa to you. I find it about right. It will do. We shall meet this evening. Yours--Schikaneder.” A church hymn was afterwards put to the air: _Bei Maennern welche Liebe fuehlen_. How ideal must not those lines have been when the higher moral sentiments could be awakened by so simple an air! That best known of all solemn songs: _In diesen heil’gen Hallen_, has this very tone of the dignity of a heart that has mastered itself, and wisely and lovingly thinks only of humanity. Only the fact that it is as well known and as familiar to us as light and air, allows us to forget that it is as lustrous as the one and as ethereal as the other. The character of Sarastro personifies what Mozart conceived to be the deeper meaning of life. Pamina is the most beautiful expression of pure love and tenderness. Tamino is the ideal character of a youth who restrains his own feelings under life’s stern rule--and thus insures for himself and those confided to him by fate, the happiness of life. We need only ask the attention of the reader to the exclamation in the conversation with the priest, _der Lieb und Tugend Eigenthum!_--“love’s and virtue’s prize!” With the fullest expression of heart-felt conviction, these few tones describe the whole moral stability of Mozart’s nature.