ecall the singular inventive and combining
grace with which a Spectacle is always given in these stories. It is
well known that Mendelssohn contemplated an opera upon the "Tempest,"
although he did not live to execute the idea; but how charmingly is
that taken and mingled with what he had already done in the
"Midsummer-Night's Dream," at the festival of the Silver Wedding, when
the lonely tones from age to age frozen on the cups of lilies, the orbed
harmonies bound burning within the roses, the dreaming song thrilled
along the veins of violets, intricate sounds hushed under green gloom
of myrtle-leaves, mourning chords with which the cedars stood
charged,--were all disenchanted and stole forth on longing
wind-instruments and on the splendor of violins, "accumulating in
orchestral richness, as if flower after flower of music were unsheathing
to the sun"!

Yet the unlovely is not to be found within these covers: there was a
quality in the writer's mind like that fervid, all-vivifying sunshine
which so illumines the cities of the desert, so steeps the pavements,
so soaks through the pores of solids, so sharpens angles and softens
curves, as Fromentin tells us, that even squalor borrows brilliant dyes,
and rags and filth lighten into picturesque and burnished glory. And
this is well for the reader, as all have not time for philosophy, nor
can all transmute pain into treasure. But for her, sweet sounds and
sights abound in everything; bird and breeze and bee alike are winged
with melody; the music of the sea satisfies her heart, and there
"the artist-ear,--which makes a spectrum for all sounds that are
not separate, distinguishes the self-same harmonies that govern the
gradations of the orchestra, from deep to deep descending, until sounds
are lost in sound as lights in light";--the trains have their thunderous
music in her hearing; and the bells to which Cecilia listens seem to be
ringing in the last day:--"The ravishing and awful sound of them, which
is only heard by the few,--the passion in their rise and fall,--their
wavering,--their rushing fulness,--drew off all consciousness: most like
the latest and last passion,--the passion of death."

There seems to be no subject which this woman has not pondered deeply.
Her theory of Temperament is an attendant fairy that does marvellous
things for her, and not only apportions natures, but corresponding
bodies, so that we can easily see how the golden age is to return again,
wh