d answers to a force,
that must be known to enable us to combine all these forces in
accordance with their true laws.

"Composers work with substances of which they know nothing. Why should
a brass and a wooden instrument--a bassoon and horn--have so little
identity of tone, when they act on the same matter, the constituent
gases of the air? Their differences proceed from some displacement of
those constituents, from the way they act on the elements which are
their affinity and which they return, modified by some occult and
unknown process. If we knew what the process was, science and art would
both be gainers. Whatever extends science enhances art.

"Well, these are the discoveries I have guessed and made. Yes," said
Gambara, with increasing vehemence, "hitherto men have noted effects
rather than causes. If they could but master the causes, music would be
the greatest of the arts. Is it not the one which strikes deepest to the
soul? You see in painting no more than it shows you; in poetry you have
only what the poet says; music goes far beyond this. Does it not form
your taste, and rouse dormant memories? In a concert-room there may be a
thousand souls; a strain is flung out from Pasta's throat, the execution
worthily answering to the ideas that flashed through Rossini's mind
as he wrote the air. That phrase of Rossini's, transmitted to those
attentive souls, is worked out in so many different poems. To one it
presents a woman long dreamed of; to another, some distant shore where
he wandered long ago. It rises up before him with its drooping willows,
its clear waters, and the hopes that then played under its leafy arbors.
One woman is reminded of the myriad feelings that tortured her during
an hour of jealousy, while another thinks of the unsatisfied cravings of
her heart, and paints in the glowing hues of a dream an ideal lover,
to whom she abandons herself with the rapture of the woman in the Roman
mosaic who embraces a chimera; yet a third is thinking that this very
evening some hoped-for joy is to be hers, and rushes by anticipation
into the tide of happiness, its dashing waves breaking against her
burning bosom. Music alone has this power of throwing us back
on ourselves; the other arts give us infinite pleasure. But I am
digressing.

"These were my first ideas, vague indeed; for an inventor at the
beginning only catches glimpses of the dawn, as it were. So I kept these
glorious ideas at the bottom of my knapsa