piano, had not the strings snapped asunder, Hoffmann would have had to
record, not a grandly grotesque series of images, but a succession of
formless and meaningless chords.

CHERUBINO.

A PSYCHOLOGICAL ART FANCY.

It is a strange and beautiful fact that whatsoever is touched by genius,
no matter how humble in itself, becomes precious and immortal. This
wrinkled old woman is merely one of thousands like herself, who have sat
and will sit by the great porcelain stove of the Dutch backshop, their
knitting or their bible on their knees. There is nothing to make her
recollected; yet we know her after two centuries, even as if we had
seen her alive, because, with a few blurred lines and shadows hastily
scratched on his etching plate, it pleased the whim of Master Rembrandt
to pourtray her. And this little commonplace Frankfurt shopkeeper's
maiden, in her stiff little cap and starched frill, who should remember
her? Yet she is familiar to us all, because she struck the boyish fancy
of Goethe. For even as the fact of its once having sparkled on the
waistcoat of Mozart makes us treasure up a tarnished brass button;
and as the notion of their having been planted by the hand of Michael
Angelo made us mourn the cutting down of a clump of sear and rusty
old cypresses, so also the fact of having been noticed, noted down by
genius, with brush, or pen, or chisel, makes into relics men and things
which would else have been forgotten; because the stroke of that pen,
or brush, or chisel removes them from the perishable world of reality
to the deathless world of fancy. Nay, even the beautiful things, the
perfect, physically or morally, of the world, those which called forth
admiration and love as long as they existed: Antinous and Monna Lisa,
Beatrice and Laura, would now be but a handful of nameless dust, were
it not for the artists and poets who have made them live again and
for ever: the deeds and sufferings of the Siegfrieds and Cids, of the
Desdemonas and Francescas, would have died away had they not been
filched out of the world of reality into the world of fiction. And
even as the perishable, the humble, the insignificant reality becomes
enduring and valuable by the touch of genius; so also in the very world
of fiction itself the intellectual creations of one man may be raised to
infinitely higher regions by the hand of another, may be transported
into the kingdom of another and nobler art, and there be seen more
unive