"But few ever attain this understanding, for just as thousands marry for love and yet love is never once revealed to them, although they all pursue the trade of love, so do thousands hold communion with music and yet do not possess its revelation. For music also has as its foundation the sublime tokens of the moral sense, just as every art does; every genuine invention indicates moral progress. To subject oneself to its inscrutable laws, to curb and guide one's spirit by means of these laws, so that it will pour forth the revelations of music--this is the isolating principle of art. To be dissolved by its revelation--that is the surrender to the divine, which quietly exercises its mastery over the delirium of unbridled forces and thus imparts the greatest efficacy to the imagination. Thus art always represents divinity, and the human relationship to art constitutes religion. Whatever we acquire through art comes from God; it is a divine inspiration, which sets up an attainable goal for human capacities. "We do not know whence our knowledge comes; the firmly inclosed seed requires the warm, moist, electric soil to sprout, to think, to express itself. Music is the electric soil in which the soul lives, thinks, invents. Philosophy is a precipitation of its electric spirit, and the need that philosophy feels of basing everything on an ultimate principle is in turn relieved by music. Although the spirit is not master of what it creates through the mediation of music, yet it experiences ecstasy in this creation. In this way every genuine creation of art is independent, mightier than the artist himself, and through its expression it returns to its divine source; it is concerned with man only insomuch as it bears witness to divine mediation in him. "Music gives the spirit its relation to harmony. A thought, even when isolated, still senses the totality of relationship in the spirit; thus every thought in music is most intimately and inseparably related to the totality of harmony, which is unity. Everything electric stimulates the spirit to fluent, precipitous, musical creation. I myself am of an electrical nature." * * * He took me to a grand rehearsal with full orchestra, and I sat back in a box all alone in the large, unlighted hall, and saw this mighty spirit wield his authority. Oh, Goethe I No emperor, no king, is so conscious of his power, so conscious that all power radiates from him, as this same Beethoven is, who only now in the garden was searching for the source of his inspiration. If I understood him as I feel him, I should be omniscient. There he stood, so firmly resolved, his gestures and features expressing the perfection of his creation, anticipating every error, every misconception; every breath obeyed his will, and everything was set into the most rational activity by the superb presence of his spirit. One might well prophesy that such a spirit will reappear in a later reincarnation as ruler of the universe! November 4, 1810.