into albums where their purple harmonies and subtle sayings are
pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Berlioz, mad Hector of
the flaming locks, whose orchestral ozone vivified the scores of
Wagnerand Liszt, began to sound garishly empty, brilliantly
superficial; "the colossal nightingale" is difficult to classify
even to-day. A romantic by temperament he unquestionably was. But
then his music, all color, nuance, and brilliancy, was not
genuinely romantic in its themes. Compare him with Schumann, and
the genuine romanticist tops the virtuoso. Berlioz, I suspect,
was a magnified virtuoso. His orchestral technique is supreme,
but his music fails to force its way into my soul. It pricks the
nerves, it pleases the sense of the gigantic, the strange, the
formless, but there is something uncanny about it all, like some
huge, prehistoric bird, an awful Pterodactyl with goggle eyes,
horrid snout and scream. Berlioz, like Baudelaire, has the power
of evoking the shudder. But as John Addington Symonds wrote: "The
shams of the classicists, the spasms of the romanticists have
alike to be abandoned. Neither on a mock Parnassus nor on a paste-
board Blocksberg can the poet of the age now worship. The artist
walks the world at large beneath the light of natural day." All
this was before the Polish charmer distilled his sugared
wormwood, his sweet, exasperated poison, for thirsty souls
inmorbid Paris.

Think of the men and women with whom the new comer associated--
for his genius was quickly divined: Hugo, Lamartine, Pere
Lamenais,--ah! what balm for those troubled days was in his
"Paroles d'un Croyant,"--Chateaubriand, Saint-Simon, Merimee,
Gautier, Liszt, Victor Cousin, Baudelaire, Ary Scheffer, Berlioz,
Heine,--who asked the Pole news of his muse the "laughing nymph,"-