ping her form in a veil vivid as
woven gold, with the emerald eyes of Dante's Beatrice, a skin of yellow
whiteness, and that mould of figure in which undulating softness
quenches majesty,--the mould of the mystical Lucretia." There are
sea-sketches scattered among these leaves which no painter's brush will
ever equal, and morning and twilight gain new splendor and tenderness
beneath her touch.

But, after all, this was not her style's chief excellence; she cared
little for such pictorial achievements, and in presenting her fancies
she often sacrificed outline to melody; it is necessary for you to feel
rather than to see her meaning. What distinguished her yet more was the
ability by means of this style to interpret music into words. Although
this may not be correct practice, there was never a musical critic who
did not now and then attempt it: musicians themselves never do, because
music is to them nothing to see or to describe, but the air they
breathe, and in fact a state of being. Do you remember that tone-wreath
of heather and honeysuckle? "It was a movement of such intense meaning
that it was but one sigh of unblended and unfaltering melody isolated as
the fragrance of a single flower, and only the perfumes of Nature exhale
a bliss as sweet, how far more unexpressed! This short movement, that in
its oneness was complete, grew, as it were, by fragmentary harmonies,
intricate, but most gradual, into another,--a prestissimo so delicately
fitful that it was like moonlight dancing upon crested ripples; or, for
a better similitude, like quivering sprays in a summer wind. And in less
than fifty bars of regularly broken time--how ravishingly sweet I say
not--the first subject in refrain flowed through the second, and they,
interwoven even as creepers and flowers densely tangled, closed together
simultaneously." And if you have not the book by you, will you pardon
another,--the awful and eternal flow of the Mer de Glace?

"At first awoke the strange, smooth wind-notes of the opening adagio;
the fetterless chains of ice seemed to close around my heart. The
movement had no blandness in its solemnity; and so still and shiftless
was the grouping of the harmonies, that a frigidity, actual as well as
ideal, passed over my pores and hushed my pulses. After a hundred such
tense yet clinging chords, the sustaining calm was illustrated, not
broken, by a serpentine phrase of one lone oboe, pianissimo over the
piano-surface, which it