ture of his
time gave him an intellectual bias which served him well all his life.
It is fortunate that his opportunity came so early in life, when the
activity of the brain is at its highest and when lasting impressions are
produced. The mental pictures called up by the portrayal of these
tragedies came to the surface again in after years sublimated, refined,
in symphony and sonata, in mass and opera. Every one of his works has
its own story to tell; sometimes it is just the record of the events of
a day as in the Pastoral Symphony, but told with a glamour of poetry and
romance, that for the time gives us back our own youth in listening to
it; sometimes it is a tragedy which is unfolded, as in the Appassionata
Sonata or the Fifth Symphony; or it will be a Coriolanus Overture, that
seething, boiling ferment of emotion and passion, the most diverse,
contradictory, unlike, that can be imagined. From these impressions,
acquired in the ardor of youth, when the intellect grasps at knowledge
and experience with avidity, when its capacity is at its greatest, and
the whole world is laid under contribution, came a rich harvest which
untold generations may enjoy. No one of the many that made up the
audiences night after night, probably ever formed a guess at what was
going on in the brain of this quiet reserved youth during the progress
of these plays. The keen discriminating intelligence which was always
sifting and sorting these pictures and stowing them away for use in
after years,--the flashes of enthusiasm,--the intuitive discernment of
intellectual subtleties that brought him into _rapport_ with the author
and gave him the perception of being on an equality with the great ones
of the earth, here were forces already in operation which were destined
to influence the world for generations to come. To fall from this ideal
world of the intellect and the emotions, at the cue of the conductor,
back to the cognitions of ordinary life, and a realization of its
limitations, must have been as tragic an experience to this youth, who
said of himself: "I live only in my art," as any he had seen depicted on
the stage. Mental processes like these write their lines deeply on the
faces of gifted people.

Of the thirty-one members of the orchestra some had already attained
fame, and others achieved it in after years. In this collection of
geniuses the attrition of mind on mind must have been of benefit to
each. The conductor, Joseph Reicha, h