celestial regions, toward
which they rise like a melodious incense. Music awakens in us
reminiscences, souvenirs, associations. When we have wept over a song,
it ever after seems to us bathed in tears.

A celebrated pianist tells me that, in a city where he was giving
concerts, he became acquainted with a charming young girl. He was twenty
years old, and had all the poetic and generous illusions of that
romantic age. She was sixteen. They loved each other without daring to
confess it, and perhaps without knowing it themselves. But the hour of
separation came: he was passing his last evening at her house. Observed
by the family, he could only furtively join hands with her at the moment
of parting. The poem was but commenced, to be arrested at the first
page: he never saw her again. Disheartened, distracted with grief, he
wandered through the dark streets, until at two in the morning he found
himself again under her windows. She too was awake. Their thoughts,
drawn together by that divine tie which merits the name of love only in
the morning of life, met in unison, for she was playing gently in the
solitude of her chamber the first notes of a mazurka which they had
danced together. "Tears came to my eyes," said my friend, "on hearing
this music, which seemed to me sublime; it was the stifled plaint of her
heart; it was her grief which exhaled from her fingers; it was the
eternal adieu. For years I believed this mazurka to be a marvellous
inspiration, and it was not till long after, when age had dispelled my
illusions and obliterated the adored image, that I discovered it was
only a vulgar and trivial commonplace: the gold was changed to brass."

The old man, chilled by years, may be insensible to the pathetic accents
of Rossini, of Mozart: but repeat to him the simple songs of his youth,
the present vanishes, and the illusions of the past come back again. I
once knew an old Spanish general who detested music. One day I began to
play to him my "Siege of Saragossa," in which is introduced the "Marcha
Real" (Spanish national air), and he wept like a child. This air
recalled to him the immortal defence of the heroic city, behind the
falling walls of which he had fought against the French, and sounded to
him, he said, like the voice of all the holy affections expressed by the
word _home_. The mercenary Swiss troops, when in France and Naples,
could not hear the "Ranz des Vaches" (the shepherd song of old and rude
Helvetia) wi