mirror of life, and that all the great symphonies taken together are like a book of life in which everything is faithfully set forth in due proportion and balance. I have said that the symphony contains everything and that it has room for disorder. This is its ultimate purpose. The secret of its power lies in this. Life itself is an inexplicable thing. The great symphony compresses it into an hour of perfection in which all of its elements are explicable. Here that dream of man which he calls by such names as “heaven” or “happiness,” and which he has always sought in vain, becomes not only a reality, but the only reality possible for him. For nothing would be more terrible than endless happiness or a located heaven. II. STAGES OF ITS DEVELOPMENT The history of the symphony is the history of all art. It moves in cycles; it marks a parabola. It began as a naïve expression of feeling; it learned little by little how to master its own working material, and as it mastered that, it became more and more conscious in its efforts; as soon as new instruments for producing it were perfected, it immediately expanded its style to correspond to the new possibilities; as its technique permitted, it continually sought to grasp more and more of the elements of human life and human aspiration and to express them. In Haydn we see it as naïve, folk-like, tuneful music, not highly imaginative, smacking of the soil--like Burns, but without his deep human feeling. In Mozart it reaches a stage of classic perfection which may be compared to Raphael’s paintings. Hardly a touch of the picturesque, the romantic, or the realistic mars its serene beauty; it smiles on all alike; it is not for you or for me,--as Schumann is,--but for every one. And being purely objective it belongs to no time and lasts forever. And how delightful are Mozart’s digressions. He is like Fielding, who, when he wants to philosophize about his story, proceeds to write a whole chapter during which the action awaits the philosopher’s pleasure. Later writers never drop the argument for a moment; if there is a lull in the action it is somehow kept in complete relation to the subject-matter. Mozart often enlivens you with a story by-the-way, but he always manages to preserve the continuity of his material. The difference between his method and that of Brahms, for example, is like that between Fielding’s philosophic interlude chapters in “Tom Jones” and Meredith’s “Our Philosopher,” who, looking down from an impersonal height upon the characters in the story, interjects his Olympian comment.