Second. Be more sparing of your praise: above all, of its highest terms. We should have a sense of mental as well as moral honor, which, while it makes us feel the baseness of uttering merely hasty and ignorant censure, will also forbid that hasty and extravagant praise which strict truth will not justify. A man of honor wishes to utter no word to which he cannot adhere. The offices of Poet--of Hero-worship--are sacred, and he who has a heart to appreciate the excellent should call nothing excellent which falls short of being so. Leave yourself some incense worthy of the _best_; do not lavish it on the merely _good_. It is better to be too cool than extravagant in praise; and though mediocrity may be elated if it can draw to itself undue honors, true greatness shrinks from the least exaggeration of its claims. The truly great are too well aware how difficult is the attainment of excellence, what labors and sacrifices it requires, even from genius, either to flatter themselves as to their works, or to be otherwise than grieved at idolatry from others; and so, with best wishes, and a hope to meet again, we bid farewell to the "Landscape Painter." BEETHOVEN.[6] This book bears on its outside the title, "Life of Beethoven, by Moscheles." It is really only a translation of Schindler, and it seems quite unfair to bring Moscheles so much into the foreground, merely because his name is celebrated in England. He has only contributed a few notes and a short introduction, giving a most pleasing account of his own devotion to the Master. Schindler was the trusty friend of Beethoven, and one whom he himself elected to write his biography. Inadequate as it is, there is that fidelity in the collection of materials which makes it serviceable to our knowledge of Beethoven, and we wish it might be reprinted in America. Though there is little knowledge of music here, yet so far as any exists in company with a free development of mind, the music of Beethoven is _the_ music which delights, which awakens, which inspires, an infinite hope. This influence of these most profound, bold, original and singular compositions, even upon the uninitiated, above those of a simpler construction and more obvious charms, we have observed with great pleasure. For we think its cause lies deep, far beneath fancy, taste, fashion, or any accidental cause. It is because there is a real and steady unfolding of certain thoughts which pervade the civilized world. They strike their roots through to us beneath the broad Atlantic; and these roots shoot stems upward to the light wherever the soil allows them free course. Our era, which permits of freer inquiry, of bolder experiment, than ever before, and a firmer, broader, basis, may also, we sincerely trust, be depended on for nobler discovery and a grander scope of thought.