Berlioz’s temperament was like a volcano bursting continually into fire and flame and his mind took delight in everything of enormous magnitude. He loved to think of the Pyramids of Egypt, of huge lonely mountains, of great seas, the bursting of thunderbolts and the howl of tempests. Everything with him appeared in colossal proportions; and, consequently, much of his music seemed to the people of his time, even more than to us to-day, to have been written for the ears of giants and Titans and not for men and women of ordinary build. Heine appreciated this phase of the extravagant Berlioz. “A colossal nightingale, a lark the size of an eagle,” he wrote of him, “such as once existed in the primæval world. Yes, the music of Berlioz, in general seems to me primitive almost antediluvian; it sets me dreaming of gigantic species of extinct animals, of mammoths, of fabulous empires with fabulous sins, of all kinds of impossibilities piled one on top of the other. These magic accents recall to us Babylon, the hanging-gardens of Semiramis, the marvels of Nineveh, the audacious edifices of Mizraim such as are shown in the pictures of the English painter Martin.” This is all true, but it represents only one side of Berlioz. Berlioz could be exquisite and dainty as well as colossal and terrific, as we hear in the _Queen Mab Scherzo_ from the _Roméo et Juliette Symphony_, and the _Dance of the Sylphs_ from the _Damnation of Faust_. Berlioz is called the “Father of Modern Orchestration.” To appreciate the magnitude of his work, we must forget all our modern music for a moment and remember what the Orchestra was like when Berlioz, a country boy of eighteen, arrived in Paris in 1821. [Illustration: BERLIOZ _By Fischer_]