ow not how I descended
again. Thoughts without number hover about me. This music breathes a
spirit of noble, self-conscious repose, and is free from all oppressed
humility. It is a life that can never fade; nay, it is the odor of
ripened fruit.

This last work of Mozart's has a companion piece in Lessing's last
work: "Nathan the Wise." In both of them the soul wings its flight far
beyond the disjointed, struggling world and dwells in the pure region
beyond, where peace and piety have become actual existences, and where
the vexations of narrow, circumscribed, finite humanity provoke but a
smile. The great treasure of humanity is not buried in the past; it
must be dug out, fashioned and created from the future.

"Nathan" and the "Magic Flute" abound with precious gems. They prove
that happiness is not an illusion, but they speak in a language
unintelligible to him who does not bear within himself a sense of
things above this life.

To have lived such hours is life eternal.

The song of the three boys is full of divine bliss. If the angels in
Raphael's Sistine Madonna were to sing, such would be their melodies,
and in this register would their voices move.

I would like to hear such sounds at my dying hour, for that would be an
ecstatic death.

If such ecstasy could only continue without interruption.

After the opera was over, I sat in the park for a long time. All was
dark and silent.

Filled with this music, I would gladly fly back to my forest solitude,
have nothing more to do with the world, and silently pass away. After
these, no other tones should fall upon my ear and disturb me.

But I was obliged to return to the world.

And here I sit, late at night, the whole world resting in sleep and
self-oblivion, while I am awake in self-oblivion.

O ye eternal spirits! Could one but be with you and utter a word, a
sound, that should pass into infinity! In yonder gallery, eyes that
never close, look down upon the coming and departing generations. And
here there are undying harmonies and imperishable words.

Oh ye blessed spirits, ye who through art create a second world! The
world confuses and perplexes us, but ye make everything clear as the
light of day. Ye are the blessed genii who ever offer mankind the wine
of life in the golden chalice which, though millions drink from it, is
never emptied.

It is with deep pain that I depart from the realm of color and that of
sound. This, and this only, is indeed a d