plete form."[10]

[Footnote 10: From a writer in the New-York Herald.]

Very recently, Mr. Moncure D. Conway thus expresses his high
admiration for the work of Wagner:--

"I am satisfied that the English-speaking world is little
aware at present of the immensity and importance of the work
Wagner has done for art. Plato declared that the true
musician must have poetry and music harmonized in himself;
and the world has waited twenty-five hundred years for that
combination to appear. Having carefully read the poems all
written by himself which Wagner has set to music, or rather
which incarnated themselves in music, and costumed
themselves in scenery as he wrote them, I venture to affirm
that none can so read them without the conviction that their
author is a true poet. In the first place, the general
conception of his chief operas, taken together, is in the
largest sense poetic, and I might even say Homeric. This man
has transmitted an entire religion to poetry, and then set
it to music. And it is one of the greatest of
religions,--what Nature engraved on the heart of our own
Teutonic ancestors. It is all there,--its thousand
phantasmal years, from the first cowering cry of the Norse
savage before the chariot of his storm-god to the last
gentle hymn that rose to Freya under her new name of
Mary,--all. It is interpreted as a purely human expression;
and, I repeat, no man has done so vast and worthy an
artistic work in our time."

While America has perhaps produced as yet no _great_ composers, it has
several of very high merit, such as J.K. Paine, Dudley Buck, and
others. In the United States there are many remarkable vocal and
instrumental artists, a large number of classical musical clubs and
societies; while several of its great vocalists, male and female,
accept and decline engagements in Europe. Perhaps no finer orchestra
exists anywhere than that of Theodore Thomas of New York; while nearly
as high praise may be given to the Mendelssohn and Beethoven Quintette
Clubs of Boston, and to others in different parts of the country.

Music is quite generally cultivated in this country; and there are
many excellent critics, musical writers, and periodicals devoted to
this beautiful and elevating science.

A very startling late American musical invention is the "telephone," a
description of the working of w