te reward to a successful cultivator, and is in itself so divine
in its immediate effects upon human souls! Who shall say what may be the
after-results of those effects which the waiters on posterity presume to
despise because they are immediate? A dull man, to whose mind a ray of
that vague starlight undetected in the atmosphere of workday life has
never yet travelled; to whom the philosopher, the preacher, the poet
appeal in vain,--nay, to whom the conceptions of the grandest master of
instrumental music are incomprehensible; to whom Beethoven unlocks no
portal in heaven; to whom Rossini has no mysteries on earth unsolved
by the critics of the pit,--suddenly hears the human voice of the human
singer, and at the sound of that voice the walls which enclosed him
fall. The something far from and beyond the routine of his commonplace
existence becomes known to him. He of himself, poor man, can make
nothing of it. He cannot put it down on paper, and say the next morning,
"I am an inch nearer to heaven than I was last night;" but the feeling
that he is an inch nearer to heaven abides with him. Unconsciously he
is gentler, he is less earthly, and, in being nearer to heaven, he is
stronger for earth. You singers do not seem to me to understand that you
have--to use your own word, so much in vogue that it has become abused
and trite--a mission! When you talk of missions, from whom comes the
mission? Not from men. If there be a mission from man to men, it must be
appointed from on high.

Think of all this; and in being faithful to your art, be true to
yourself. If you feel divided between that art and the art of the
writer, and acknowledge the first to be too exacting to admit a rival,
keep to that in which you are sure to excel. Alas, my fair child! do not
imagine that we writers feel a happiness in our pursuits and aims more
complete than that which you can command. If we care for fame (and, to
be frank, we all do), that fame does not come up before us face to
face, a real, visible, palpable form, as it does to the singer, to the
actress. I grant that it may be more enduring, but an endurance on
the length of which we dare not reckon. A writer cannot be sure of
immortality till his language itself be dead; and then he has but a
share in an uncertain lottery. Nothing but fragments remains of the
Phrynichus who rivalled AEschylus; of the Agathon who perhaps excelled
Euripides; of the Alcaeus, in whom Horace acknowledged a master