'--the unapproachable wonder to all time--that is, twenty
years after his death about--and to this pamphlet was prefixed as
motto this startling axiom--'In Music, the Beau Ideal changes every
thirty years'--well, is not that _true_? The _Idea_, mind,
changes--the general standard ... so that it is no answer that a
single air, such as many one knows, may strike as freshly as
ever--they were _not_ according to the Ideal of their own time--just
now, they drop into the ready ear,--next hundred years, who will be
the Rossini? who is no longer the Rossini even I remember--his early
overtures are as purely Rococo as Cimarosa's or more. The sounds
remain, keep their character perhaps--the scale's proportioned notes
affect the same, that is,--the major third, or minor seventh--but the
arrangement of these, the sequence the law--for them, if it _should_
change every thirty years! To Corelli nothing seemed so conclusive in
Heaven or earth as this

[Illustration: Music]

I don't believe there is one of his sonatas wherein that formula does
not do duty. In these things of Handel that seems replaced by

[Illustration: Music]

--that was the only true consummation! Then,--to go over the hundred
years,--came Rossini's unanswerable coda:

[Illustration: Music]

which serves as base to the infinity of songs, gone, gone--_so_ gone
by! From all of which Ba draws _this_ 'conclusion' that these may be
worse things than Bartoli's Tuscan to cover a page with!--yet, yet the
pity of it! Le Jeune, the Phoenix, and Rossini who directed his
letters to his mother as 'mother of the famous composer'--and Henry
Lawes, and Dowland's Lute, ah me!

Well, my conclusion is the best, the everlasting, here and I trust
elsewhere--I am your own, my Ba, ever your

R.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Tuesday Morning.
[Post-mark, March 10, 1846.]

Now I shall know what to believe when you talk of very bad and very
indifferent doings of yours. Dearest, I read your 'Soul's Tragedy'
last night and was quite possessed with it, and fell finally into a
mute wonder how you could for a moment doubt about publishing it. It
is very vivid, I think, and vital, and impressed me more than the
first act of 'Luria' did, though I do not mean to compare such
dissimilar things, and for pure nobleness 'Luria' is
unapproachable--will prove so, it seems to me.