pretty girls than any other country in the world, it is easier to fall
in love here than elsewhere, and that there is, therefore, no excuse
whatever for American composers if they do not soon lead the world in
musical inspiration.

Feminine beauty, however, is not the only kind of beauty that arouses
dormant musical ideas and brings them to light. The beauty of nature
appeals as strongly to musicians as to poets, and is responsible for
many of their inspirations. When Mendelssohn visited Fingal's Cave, he
wrote a letter on one of the Hebrides, inclosing twenty bars of music
"to show how extraordinarily the place affected me," to use his own
words. "These twenty bars," says Sir George Grove, "an actual
inspiration, are virtually identical with the opening of the wonderful
overture which bears the name of 'Hebrides' or 'Fingal's Cave.'" And
an English admirer of Mendelssohn, who had the honor of entertaining
him in the country, notes how deeply he entered into the beauty of the
hills and the woods. "His way of representing them," he says, "was not
with the pencil; but in the evenings his improvised music would show
what he had observed or felt in the past day. The piece which he
called 'The Rivulet,' which he wrote at that time, for my sister
Susan, will show what I mean; it was a recollection of a real, actual
rivulet.

"We observed" he continues, "how natural objects seemed to suggest
music to him. There was in my sister Honora's garden a pretty creeping
plant, new at that time, covered with little trumpet-like flowers. He
was struck with it, and played for her the music which (he said) the
fairies might play on those trumpets. When he wrote out the piece he
drew a little branch of that flower all up the margin of the paper."
In another piece, inspired by the sight of carnations, they found that