symphony! Yes, music is truly the mediator
between the spiritual and the sensuous world. I should like to discuss
this with Goethe; I wonder whether he would understand me! Melody is the
sensuous life of poetry. Does not the spiritual content of a poem become
sensuous feeling through melody? Do we not in the song of Mignon feel
her whole sensuous mood through melody, and does not this sensation
incite one in turn to new creations? Then the spirit longs to expand to
boundless universality where everything together forms a channel for the
_feelings_ that spring from the simple musical thought and that
otherwise would die away unnoted. This is harmony; this is expressed in
my symphonies; the blending of manifold forms rolls on to the goal in a
single channel. At such moments one feels that something eternal,
infinite, something that can never be wholly comprehended, lies in all
things spiritual; and although I always have the feeling of success in
my compositions, yet with the last stroke of the drum with which I have
driven home my own enjoyment, my musical conviction, to my hearers, I
feel an eternal hunger to begin anew, like a child, what a moment before
seemed to me to have been exhausted.

"Speak to Goethe of me; and tell him to hear my symphonies. Then he will
agree with me that music is the sole incorporeal entrance into a higher
world of knowledge which, to be sure, embraces man, but which he, on the
other hand, can never embrace. Rhythm of the spirit is necessary to
comprehend music in its essence; music imparts presentiments,
inspirations of divine science, and what the spirit experiences of the
sensuous in it is the embodiment of spiritual knowledge. Although the
spirits live upon music as man lives upon air, it is a very different
matter to _comprehend_ it with the spirit. But the more the soul draws
its sensuous nourishment from it, the riper the spirit becomes for a
happy mutual understanding.

"But few ever attain this understanding, for just as thousands marry for
love and yet love is never once revealed to them, although they all
pursue the trade of love, so do thousands hold communion with music and
yet do not possess its revelation. For music also has as its foundation
the sublime tokens of the moral sense, just as every art does; every
genuine invention indicates moral progress. To subject oneself to its
inscrutable laws, to curb and guide one's spirit by means of these laws,
so that it will pour fort