"After all," he wrote in 1874, "Music is the Queen of the Arts. What are all the miserable concrete forms into which we endeavour to throw 'thoughts too deep for tears' or too rapturous for mortal mirth, compared with the divine, abstract, oceanic utterances of that voice which can multiply a thousandfold and exhaust in infinite echoes the passions that on canvas, in marble, or even in poesy (the composite style in aesthetics), so often leave us cold and emotionless! I believe Music to be as far above the other Arts as the affections of the soul above the rarest ingenuity of the perfect orator! Perhaps you are far from agreeing with me. Indeed the common charge brought against her by her sisters among the Pierides--and by the transcendentalists and philosophical Critics--is that She has no type like the other Arts on which to model her creations and to regulate her inspirations. I say her inexhaustible spring is the soul itself, and its fiery inmost--the chamber illuminated from the centre of Being--as the finest and most subtle ethers are begotten of, and flow nearest to the Sun." Frederick lived at Florence till 1857 and found there, after years of wandering, his first settled home. The idea of settling tickled his humour, and in 1853 he writes: "I am a regular family man now with four children (the last of whom promises to be the most eccentric of a humorous set) and an Umbrella." In Florence he came in contact with Caroline Norton and her son Brinsley, of the latter of whom he writes an amusing account: