Let none accuse Nature of niggardness because neither seed time nor summer bends with the ripened corn and wheat. Let him await her seasonable yield, unfailing while the sun shines and the earth revolves. But Nature has sowing and springing and ripening in other and far distant fields; and if we, unseeing, comprehend not, let it suffice that she, the wise and provident, wholly knows what sun is shining on those fields, and the diameter of the orbital turning of their world she knows, and the orderly come and go of their unfailing seasons. And so it befell that in fitly appointed time, and not in capricious moment, she gave to the world Sebastian Bach to be the great individualizer and father of German music. Of Bach's contemporaries and forerunners of the Flemish school, the most worthy were undoubtedly those whom he revered; those who, either by creation or interpretation, incited him to early effort, and easily moulded his plastic youth into semblance of the unsurpassed composer and performer which, because of mature and independent after-labor, he wholly became. And yet, as compared with him, of what largeness are his outgrown models? Of what enduring substance, of what undimmable fame, such musicians as Sweelinck, Scheidemann, Schuitz, and even Reinken and Buxtehude? Many a genius has towered the one exception in a family not intellectually prominent. Unlike the majority of his class, Bach owed much to heredity. Others of his blood, immediate ancestors and numerous living relatives, all had accomplished something worthy of mention in music. Nor did Nature expend her energies in producing him the greatest of the Bachs. That of which his genius was the culmination, ceasing not with himself, experienced a gradual decline through his numerous descendants. Never was a genius more thoroughly equipped for his life work than was Sebastian Bach. Musical learning in him first reached its fullness. In his larger compositions, as in the epics of Milton, every page reveals the student of the ages; but what in lesser men sinks to dry scholarship, in Bach, as in Milton, becomes a glorious compendium of classical erudition, and this because of the abundant presence of that transforming quality denied to mediocrity, to wit, Imagination. Many a great page of Milton, and, for that matter, of Dante also, proves but hard reading to the unlettered who oftentimes would conceal their ignorance under the guise of fulsome praise. So with Bach. While granting his obvious learning, many amateurs, fairly musical, and not a few professional musicians, but little estimate his noble quality of imagination.