re professional musicians, there can be no doubt of the
governing power of music. In recent musical history there is one
eminent composer who married a woman also prominent in music. In fact,
Clara Wieck has been called the most eminent woman who ever took up
music as a profession. It would be hard to deny Robert Schumann a place
among the major gods of creative art. Every one knows how he began to
love Clara, and she him, when he was first leaving his teens and she
entering her fame as an eleven-year-old prodigy. Their fidelity through
the storm and stress of their courtship, their lifelong sympathy and
collaboration in conserving a humanly perfect home, and in achieving a
dual immortality, both as lovers and as musicians--these certainly
indicate music as a solidifying and enriching force in society.

And now, finally, in the procession that has filed past you, you have
seen almost every imaginable form of love and lover, of husband and
Lothario, or woman-hater. There have been cool-blooded bachelors like
Haendel, Schubert, and Brahms; there have been passionate pilgrims like
Chopin, Beethoven, and Liszt, who loved many women, and married none.
There have been the home-keeping breeders of children, and contentment,
such as Willaert, Orlando di Lasso, Palestrina, the Bachs, Gluck,
Piccinni, Weber, Mendelssohn, and Schumann; and Bizet, whose wife said
after his death, that there was not a moment of their six years'
honeymoon she could regret or would not re-live. There have been the
unhappily wed, who, through the fault of themselves, or their wives,
found and made misery at home, and sought nepenthe elsewhere, such as
Haydn, Berlioz, and Tschaikovski. There have been married lives of
mixed nature, neither failure nor success, such as the careers of
Lully, Rameau, Stradivari, and Wagner.

If any one lives who could extract from this medley a theory as to the
effect of music upon the human heart,--a theory that will satisfy
himself alone, to say nothing of the world in general,--he is welcome
to his conclusion. To me it is a chaos wherethrough I cannot pretend to
trace any thread of unity. I can only fall back upon this agnosticism:
if any man argue to the effect, that music has a moral influence on
life, I will hurl at his head some of the most brilliant rascals in
domestic chronicle; and equally, if any man will deny that music has a
moral effect, I will barricade his path with some of the most beautiful
lives that ha