by terrible spasms, weep and laugh at once, and manifest all the
symptoms of delirium and fever, while listening to the masterpieces of
our great masters." He relates the case of a young Provencal musician,
who blew out his brains at the door of the Opera after a second
hearing of Spontini's "Vestale," having previously explained in a
letter, that after this ecstatic enjoyment, he did not care to remain
in this prosaic world; and the case of the famous singer Malibran,
who, on hearing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for the first time, at the
Conservatoire, "was seized with such convulsions that she had to be
carried out of the hall." "We have in such cases," Berlioz continues,
"seen time and again, serious men obliged to leave the room to hide
the violence of their emotions from the public gaze." As for those
feelings which Berlioz owed personally to music, he affirms that
nothing in the world can give an exact idea of them to those who have
not experienced them. Not to mention the moral affections that the art
developed in him, and only to cite the impressions received at the
moment of the performance of works he admired, this is what he says he
can affirm in all truthfulness: "While hearing certain pieces of
music, my vital forces seem at first to be doubled; I feel a delicious
pleasure, in which reason has no part; the habit of analysis itself
then gives rise to admiration; the emotion, growing in the direct
ratio of the energy and grandeur of the composer's ideas, soon
produces a strange agitation in the circulation of the blood; my
arteries pulsate violently; tears, which usually announce the end of
the paroxysm, often indicate only a progressive stage which is to
become much more intense. In this case there follow spasmodic
contractions of the muscles, trembling in all the limbs, a total
numbness in the feet and hands, partial paralysis of the optic and
auditory nerves. I can no longer see, I can hardly hear: vertigo ...
almost swooning...." Such was the effect of music on Berlioz.

As in a matter of this sort personal testimony is of more value than
anything else, I may perhaps be permitted to refer to some of my own
experiences. I have often been in the state of mind and body so
vividly described by Berlioz, except as regards the numbness of the
extremities and the partial paralysis of the sensory nerves. Hundreds
of times I have enjoyed that harmless aesthetic intoxication which I
believe to be more delicious to