ces of German art and thought which can account for the
advent of the great musician? In art Duerer stood by the side of
Luther. In him again we find a man. Thought, thought! help me to
express my native thought. Teach me to express in my art the reality of
Nature, its wonderful beauty, thrice beautiful to me an artist; the
pathos of life, its realism, far apparently from the ideal, yet most
precious to me as a man. This was the aim of Duerer, and he seems a man
after the Lutheran mould.

The aim of Duerer may be found in some respects in Bach's work, because
both men were men of integrity, great and patient in soul. This, of
course, is not to say that Bach was affected by Duerer, but is merely an
endeavor to find what was noblest in Germany preceding Bach. One more
allusion. In Bach's art we trace the mystic; not shadowy outpourings of
hysterical emotion, but beauties of eternal verities disclosed in
vision--faint, it is true--to none save the noblest of mortals.

One such kindred spirit preceding Bach was Boehme, the father of German
mysticism, the poor cobbler, whose soul lay far away in the regions of
celestial love, and whose utterance is of the realities thereof. These
three men, Luther, Duerer, Boehme, are those to whom the great musician
Bach is akin, but he is truly the child of the former, and the father of
the highest aspirations in instrumental music.

For confirmatory evidence we have only to trace the growth of the Bach
family. The progenitor, Veit Bach, was born at Wechmar, near Gotha, in
1550, and, following his trade as a baker, settled, after considerable
wanderings, near the Hungarian frontier. Veit Bach was a stanch
Lutheran. Whether the Lutheran services had given him a love of music,
or whether they had only quickened a constitutional sympathy, it is
impossible to say. Certain it is that he was passionately fond of music,
and, cast for a period among a population whose emotions found constant
and ready utterance in tone, he brought back to Wechmar, whither he had
returned on account of religious persecution, his beloved cythringa and
the art of playing it. There is evidence that this knowledge afforded
him consolation and enjoyment in the quiet monotony of his life. While
the mill was working, Veit Bach was often playing; and doubtless the
peculiar charm and rhythm of old Hungarian melodies, songs of the
people, which he had learned from the wandering gypsies, recurred to
him, as well as those gr