ve ever bloomed upon earth. It is, after all, a matter of
time, tide, and temperament. If a man of amorous nature happens to lead
a life of much leisure, his idle mind will turn one way; and if the
tide of opportunity concur, he will be dissipated, whether he be
composer, clergyman, business man, bravo, soldier, sailor, carpenter,
king, plumber, poet, pope, or peasant.

The long and the short of it is, perhaps, that music, being a universal
art, like a universal watch-key, will set going the complicated cogs
and springs of every soul and yet not regulate or assure its rhythm.
Music stimulates and satisfies the mind in any of its whims, and you
can tune it to a softly chanted prayer, or to a dance orgy; to a hymn
of exultation, or a tinkling serenade; a kindergarten song, to the
bloodthirst of armies; to voluptuous desires that cannot or dare not be
worded, or to raptures distilled of every human dross; to cynical
raillery, or the very throb of a young lover's heart; to the hilarity
of a drinking song, or the midnight elegies of ineffable despair. How
is such an art as this to compel, or to deny anything or anybody?

Musicians, then, are only ordinary clay, who happened to make music,
instead of other things of more or less beauty or value. They are
every-day puppets of circumstance and of inner and outer environment,
who might have been happier, and might have been unhappier, with the
women they wed or did not wed, had those women died younger, or lived
longer--or with other women, or with none at all.

THE END.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

_Of Books Consulted and Cited in This Work_

* * * * *

BAINI (GIUSEPPE).

Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di G. Pierluigi da
Palestrina. 2 vols. Rome, 1828.

BEAUFORT (RAPHAEL LEDOS DE).

Franz Lizst. The Story of his Life. Boston, 1887.

BEETHOVEN'S LETTERS. See Nohl.

BELART (HANS).

Richard Wagner in Zuerich (1849-1859). 2 vols. Leipzig. 1901.

BELLAIGNE (CAMILLE).

Portraits and Silhouettes of Musicians. Translated by Ellen Orr. New
York, 1897.

BELLASIS (Edward).

Cherubini. Memorials illustrative of his life. London. 1874.

BEYLE (MARIE HENRI).

Lettres entre de Vienne en Autriche sur le celebre compositeur Haydn,
suivees d'une vie de Mozart et de considerations sur Metastasio. Pub.
1814, first under the pseudonym _L.A. Bombet_, and when exposed as a
steal from Carpani (_q. v_.) republished under the pseudonym