about the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture.
But it was some time longer before I began to know this by personal
experience. The only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from
childhood taken great pleasure, was music; the best effect of which
(and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art) consists in exciting
enthusiasm; in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an elevated
kind which are already in the character, but to which this excitement
gives a glow and a fervour, which, though transitory at its utmost
height, is precious for sustaining them at other times. This effect of
music I had often experienced; but like all my pleasurable
susceptibilities it was suspended during the gloomy period. I had sought
relief again and again from this quarter, but found none. After the tide
had turned, and I was in process of recovery, I had been helped forward
by music, but in a much less elevated manner. I at this time first
became acquainted with Weber's Oberon, and the extreme pleasure which I
drew from its delicious melodies did me good, by showing me a source of
pleasure to which I was as susceptible as ever. The good, however, was
much impaired by the thought, that the pleasure of music (as is quite
true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere tune) fades with
familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermittence, or fed
by continual novelty. And it is very characteristic both of my then
state, and of the general tone of my mind at this period of my life,
that I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of
musical combinations. The octave consists only of five tones and two
semi-tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways,
of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed
to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room
for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out, as these had
done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. This
source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the