de; and now,
by a lucky chance, I can brood over it here in Salzburg, where Mozart
was born, where he lived, where the house in which he wrote the opera is
to be seen, a little garden-house brought over from Vienna and set down
where it should always have been, high up among the pinewoods of the
Capuzinerberg. I find myself wondering how much Mozart took to himself,
how much went to his making, in this exquisite place, set in a hollow of
great hills, from which, if you look down upon it, it has the air of a
little toy town out of a Noah's Ark, set square in a clean, trim,
perfectly flat map of meadows, with its flat roofs, packed close
together on each side of a long, winding river, which trails across the
whole breadth of the plain. From the midst of the town you look up
everywhere at heights; rocks covered with pine-trees, beyond them hills
hooded with white clouds, great soft walls of darkness, on which the
mist is like the bloom of a plum; and, right above you, the castle, on
its steep rock swathed in trees, with its grey walls and turrets, like
the castle which one has imagined for all the knights of all the
romances. All this, no doubt, entered into the soul of Mozart, and had
its meaning for him; but where I seem actually to see him, where I can
fancy him walking most often, and hearing more sounds than elsewhere
come to him through his eyes and his senses, in the Mirabell-Garten,
which lies behind the palace built by an Archbishop of Salzburg in the
seventeenth century, and which is laid out in the conventional French
fashion, with a harmony that I find in few other gardens. I have never
walked in a garden which seemed to keep itself so reticently within its
own severe and gracious limits. The trees themselves seem to grow
naturally into the pattern of this garden, with its formal alleys, in
which the birds fly in and out of the trellised roofs, its square-cut
bushes, its low stone balustrades, its tall urns out of which droop
trails of pink and green, its round flower-beds, each of a single
colour, set at regular intervals on the grass, its tiny fountain
dripping faintly into a green and brown pool; the long, sad lines of
the Archbishop's Palace, off which the brown paint is peeling; the whole
sad charm, dainty melancholy, formal beauty, and autumnal air of it. It
was in the Mirabell-Garten that I seemed nearest to Mozart.

The music of Mozart, as one hears it in "Die Zauberfloete," is music
without desire, mus