so
ugly that any "success with the fair" (to use the stereotyped formula of
1809) was out of the question; the realities of life always fell short
of the ideals which Pons created for himself; the world without was
not in tune with the soul within, but Pons had made up his mind to the
dissonance. Doubtless the sense of beauty that he had kept pure and
living in his inmost soul was the spring from which the delicate,
graceful, and ingenious music flowed and won him reputation between 1810
and 1814.

Every reputation founded upon the fashion or the fancy of the hour, or
upon the short-lived follies of Paris, produces its Pons. No place in
the world is so inexorable in great things; no city of the globe so
disdainfully indulgent in small. Pons' notes were drowned before long in
floods of German harmony and the music of Rossini; and if in 1824 he
was known as an agreeable musician, a composer of various drawing-room
melodies, judge if he was likely to be famous in 183l! In 1844, the year
in which the single drama of this obscure life began, Sylvain Pons was
of no more value than an antediluvian semiquaver; dealers in music had
never heard of his name, though he was still composing, on scanty pay,
for his own orchestra or for neighboring theatres.

And yet, the worthy man did justice to the great masters of our day; a
masterpiece finely rendered brought tears to his eyes; but his religion
never bordered on mania, as in the case of Hoffmann's Kreislers; he kept
his enthusiasm to himself; his delight, like the paradise reached by
opium or hashish, lay within his own soul.

The gift of admiration, of comprehension, the single faculty by which
the ordinary man becomes the brother of the poet, is rare in the city
of Paris, that inn whither all ideas, like travelers, come to stay for
awhile; so rare is it, that Pons surely deserves our respectful esteem.
His personal failure may seem anomalous, but he frankly admitted that he
was weak in harmony. He had neglected the study of counterpoint; there
was a time when he might have begun his studies afresh and held his
own among modern composers, when he might have been, not certainly a
Rossini, but a Herold. But he was alarmed by the intricacies of modern
orchestration; and at length, in the pleasures of collecting, he found
such ever-renewed compensation for his failure, that if he had been made
to choose between his curiosities and the fame of Rossini--will it be
believed?--Pons wo