would reveal itself in
the dim light; an indistinct form, raising itself like a spectre to
listen to the sounds which had evoked it. The light, concentrated round
the piano and falling on the floor, glided on like a spreading wave
until it mingled with the broken flashes from the fire, from which
orange colored plumes rose and fell, like fitful gnomes, attracted there
by mystic incantations in their own tongue. A single portrait, that of
a pianist, an admiring and sympathetic friend, seemed invited to be the
constant auditor of the ebb and flow of tones, which sighed, moaned,
murmured, broke and died upon the instrument near which it always hung.
By a strange accident, the polished surface of the mirror only reflected
so as to double it for our eyes, the beautiful oval with silky curls
which so many pencils have copied, and which the engraver has just
reproduced for all who are charmed by works of such peculiar eloquence.

Several men, of brilliant renown, were grouped in the luminous zone
immediately around the piano: Heine, the saddest of humorists, listened
with the interest of a fellow countryman to the narrations made him by
Chopin of the mysterious country which haunted his ethereal fancy also,
and of which he too had explored the beautiful shores. At a glance,
a word, a tone, Chopin and Heine understood each other; the musician
replied to the questions murmured in his ear by the poet, giving in
tones the most surprising revelations from those unknown regions, about
that "laughing nymph" [Footnote: Heine. SALOON-CHOPIN.] of whom he
demanded news: "If she still continued to drape her silvery veil around
the flowing locks of her green hair, with a coquetry so enticing?"
Familiar with the tittle-tattle and love tales of those distant lands he
asked: "If the old marine god, with the long white beard, still pursued
this mischievous naiad with his ridiculous love?" Fully informed, too,
about all the exquisite fairy scenes to be seen DOWN THERE--DOWN THERE,
he asked "if the roses always glowed there with a flame so triumphant?
if the trees at moonlight sang always so harmoniously?" When Chopin had
answered, and they had for a long time conversed together about that
aerial clime, they would remain in gloomy silence, seized with that mal
du pays from which Heine suffered when he compared himself to that Dutch
captain of the phantom ship, with his crew eternally driven about upon
the chill waves, and "sighing in vain for th