For example: If it were a question between the destruction of this brief passage and all of Mendelsohn's compositions, the trio should be preserved without a moment's hesitation. Just as the Madonna Sixtina is worth ten times over all the canvases of Giulio Romano; and as a single mutilated figure of the frieze of the Parthenon, or the Venus of Milo, outweighs all the perfect marbles of Canova and of Thorwaldsen. Such is the transcendent value of the supreme in art. [6] Amphora cepit Institui, currente rota cur urceus exit?--_Hor. Ad Pisones._ In all the works of the great composers of the modern school--the only real school--of music, from Bach to Beethoven, including Haydn, there is a supreme dominant feeling for beauty of form, shown chiefly in melody, but hardly less apparent in harmony. Indeed, without this feeling they would not have been great. The rule is absolute: no form, no art; for art is proportion, symmetry. Melody is a series of musical proportions; like a series of arches the lines of which are harmonious. These melodic ideas they elaborated with the utmost care. It is generally supposed that ideas in art come spontaneously; and of all this might seem truest of musical ideas, which are not, like those expressed in language, in painting, in sculpture, or in architecture, required to conform themselves to a type or a purpose. They do come indeed to the musical artist, but not spontaneously in the form in which he presents them. They would not come up if they were not in the soil; but the soil must be cultivated and the growth must be pruned and trained into seeming naturalness and spontaneousness of beauty. Milton's lines-- Where the bright seraphim in burning row Their loud, uplifted angel trumpets blow--