His walk brought him to a broad stream, which flashed through the wood
like a line of light. He paused on a suspension bridge, and leaning
over the railing, gazed up the river into the distance, at the horizon
and its trees, delicate and feathery in their nakedness against the
sky. Swollen with recent rains and snows, the water came hurrying
towards him--the storm-bed of the little river, which, meandering in
from the country, through pleasant woods, in ever narrowing curves, ran
through the town as a small stream, to be swelled again on the
outskirts by the waters of two other rivers, which joined it at right
angles. The bridge trembled at first, when other people crossed it, on
their way to the woods that lay on the further side, but soon the last
stragglers vanished, and he was alone.

As he looked about, eager to discover beauty in the strip of landscape
that stretched before him--the line of water, its banks of leafless
trees--he was instinctively filled with a desire for something grander,
for a feature in the scene that would answer to his mood. There, where
the water appeared to end in a clump of trees, there, should be
mountains, a gently undulating line, blue with the unapproachable blue
of distance, and high enough to form a background to the view; in
summer, heavy with haze, melting into the sky; in winter, lined and
edged with snow. From this, his thoughts sprang back to the music he
had heard that morning. All the vague yet eager hopes that had run riot
in his brain, for months past, seemed to have been summed up and made
clear to him, in one supreme phrase of it, a great phrase in C major,
in the concluding movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. First sounded
by the shrill sweet winds, it had suddenly been given out by the
strings, in magnificent unison, and had mounted up and on, to the
jubilant trilling of the little flutes. There was such a courageous
sincerity in this theme, such undauntable resolve; it expressed more
plainly than words what he intended his life of the next few years to
be; for he was full to the brim of ambitious intentions, which he had
never yet had a chance of putting into practice. He felt so ready for
work, so fresh and unworn; the fervour of a deep enthusiasm was rampant
in him. What a single-minded devotion to art, he promised himself his
should be! No other fancy or interest should share his heart with it,
he vowed that to himself this day, when he stood for the first time o