ng in a carriage, or walking after a good
meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such
occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. _Whence_
and _how_ they come, I know not; nor can I force them. Those ideas
that please me I retain in memory, and am accustomed, as I have
been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it
soon occurs to me how I may turn this or that morsel to account,
so as to make a good dish of it; that is to say, agreeably to the
rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of the various
instruments, &c.

"All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my
subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the
whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in
my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a
beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the
parts _successively_, but I hear them, as it were, all at once
(_gleich alles zusammen_.) What a delight this is I cannot tell!
All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing
lively dream. Still the actual hearing of the _tout ensemble_ is
after all the best. What has been thus produced I do not easily
forget, and this is perhaps the best gift I have my Divine Maker
to thank for.

"When I proceed to write down my ideas, I take out of the bag of
my memory, if I may use that phrase, what has previously been
collected into it in the way I have mentioned. For this reason the
committing to paper is done quickly enough, for every thing is, as
I said before, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper
from what it was in my imagination. At this occupation, I can
therefore suffer myself to be disturbed; for whatever may be going
on around me, I write, and even talk, but only of fowls and geese,
or of Gretel or Baerbel, or some such matters. But why my
productions take from my hand that particular form and style that
makes them _Mozartish_, and different from the works of other
composers, is probably owing to the same cause which renders my
nose so or so large, so aquiline, or, in short, makes it Mozart's,
and different from those of other people. For I really do not
study or aim at any originality; I should, in fact, not be able to
describe in what mine consists, though I think it quite nat