talisman, his magic flute with which he could exorcise all the
petty terrors that beset him. Has such a man and artist--one who
was completely resolved in his works, and therefore still stands
bodily before us with all his glorious qualities after the lapse
of a century--has Mozart still something to say to us who have
just stepped timidly into a new century separated by another from
that of the composer? Much; very much. Many prophets have arisen
since Mozart's death; two of them have moved us profoundly with
their evangel. One of them knew all the mysteries, and Nature
took away his hearing lest he proclaim too much. We followed him
into all the depths of the world of feeling. The other shook us
awake and placed us in the hurly-burly of national life and
striving; pointing to his own achievements, he said: "If you wish
it, you have now a German art!" The one was Beethoven,--the other
Wagner. Because their music demands of us that we share with it
its experiences and struggles, they are the guiding spirits of a
generation which has grown up in combat and is expecting an
unknown world of combat beyond the morning mist of the new
century.

But we are in the case of the man in the fairy tale who could not
forget the merry tune of the forest bird which he had heard as a
boy. We gladly permit ourselves to be led, occasionally, out of
the rude realities that surround us, into a beautiful world that
knows no care but lies forever bathed in the sunshine of
cloudless happiness,--a world in which every loveliness of which
fancy has dreamed has taken life and form. It is because of this
that we make pilgrimages to the masterpieces of the plastic arts,
that we give heed to the speech of Schiller, listen to the music
of Mozart. When wearied by the stress of life we gladly hie to