"From early youth I have striven to make music my own. It has become to me a companion and comforter through life; it has become more and more valuable to me the more I learnt to comprehend and appreciate its boundless exuberance of ideas, its inexhaustible fulness, the more intimately its whole poetry was interwoven with my whole being.... By means of music, ideas, feelings, and historical events, natural phenomena, pictures, scenes of life of all sorts, are as clearly and intelligibly expressed as by any language in words; and we are ourselves enabled to express ourselves in such a manner and to make ourselves understood by others.... Of all the senses of man, sight and hearing are those by which most effect is produced upon mind and heart, and which are consequently the most powerful springs for the moral and rational feelings, actions, and opinions of men. But Hearing appears to be the most influential and operative of the two organs; for this reason, that by inharmonious discordant tones our feelings may be so shocked, even to their deepest recesses, and so painfully wounded as to drive us almost beside ourselves; which impression cannot possibly be produced in us by a bad picture, a dreary landscape, or a very faulty poem.... I have known persons whose spirits were broken, and their hearts rent by care, grief, and affliction. They wandered about, murmuring at their fate, absorbed in meditation, in vain seeking hope, in vain looking for a way to escape. But, the excess of their inward pangs needed alleviation; the heart discovered the means of procuring it: the deep-drawn sighs of the oppressed bosom were involuntarily converted into tones of lamentation, and this unconscious effusion was productive of relief, composure, and courageously calm resignation. Yes, indeed, it is above all in the gloomy hours of affliction that Music is a soothing comforter, a sympathizing friend to the sufferer; it gives expression to the gnawing anguish which rends the soul, and which it thereby mitigates and softens: it lends a tear to the stupefaction of grief; it drops mollifying healing balsam into every wounded heart. Whoever has experienced this effect himself, or witnessed it in others, will admit with me that for this fairest service rendered by the art we cannot sufficiently thank and revere it." How sad and suggestive are these lines, penned by a royal musician!