The compositions of Bach provoked no partisan spirit, nor cared he for that mere notoriety which benefits the well-damned equally with the well-praised. In the lives of men like Bach and Handel, every moment of well-ordered activity is a boon to their public, every moment of misdirected effort is an unmitigated loss. However, in the life of Bach we lack cause to regret an abortiveness of result lamentable in the life of Handel of whom it might be asked, Of what musical enrichment to the present are those many operatic effusions of his busy, young manhood, and his industrious middle-prime? For the most part they are dead and coffined in the dark of oblivion. Whatsoever escapes forgetfulness has, with rare exceptions, experienced a veritable reincarnation among the florid beauties of his Oratorios, the crown and glory of his last and greatest years. II By virtue of his high endowment, Bach possessed that wisdom of genius which, to the thrifty and so-called practical, is but the foolishness of the visionary. Except in the case of a few works engraved by his own hands, he gave no thought to the immediate outcome of his labors; and yet, amidst the accumulation of his great, unpublished compositions, he wrote on as if all the engravers and compositors of Saxony were crying for copy. A lesser man, a man of talent, would have seen to it that his masterpieces for voice and clavichord and organ were first in the shop and then in the home, the church and the concert hall. That he felt concern for these, his mentally-begotten, is certain; else he had spared himself that prodigious concentration of thought the result of which each preserves in a body vitalized to endure throughout the centuries. No time had he for obtuse and over-cautious publishers, nor would he debase his ideals to popularize and make saleable his inspirations. His was an artistic conscience analogous to that of the saint and the martyr; his their self-sacrifice to principle; his that undebasable virtue, that adherence to conviction, which is its own sweet reward in whatever of high or humble man's lot is fixed. His every creative act spake something like this: «Brief indeed is the most lengthened life of man, and long must the world await another Sebastian Bach. Let me use my permitted day of sunshine ere the hastening gloom enshroud and silence it forever!» So he filled to fullness the incomparable hours. Trusting in God and the Time Spirit, he left to an unknown future the propaganda of his deeds.