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The study is full of tremendous pathos; it compasses the sublime, and in its most torrential moments the composer never quite loses his mental equipoise. He, too, can evoke tragic spirits, and at will send them scurrying back to their dim profound. It has but one rival in the Chopin studies No. 12, op. 25, in the same key.

His great productions, those that show his genius well developed, are coincident with the beginning of the nineteenth century. The years 1800 and 1801 were an epoch with him as a composer. He was now thirty, and was beginning to show of what stuff he was made.

There is surely not another case in musical history in which indubitable genius, a mighty need of expression, a distinctly personal manner of sensation, a respectable musical science, a great and idealistic effort, achieved results so unsatisfactory. One wonders whether Mahler the composer was not, after all, the greatest failure in music.

That night he nominated himself for the Hall of Fame and put it to a Vote, and there was not one Dissenting Voice. Every deluded Boob who can bat up Fungoes in his own Back Yard thinks he is qualified to break into a Major League and line out Two-Baggers. There was no holding the inspired Librettist and the talented young Composer.

When some of them tried their infantile hands at composition he encouraged them. Pepys heard at least one of their achievements, and records his pleasure. And it must be remembered that Pepys was a composer and connoisseur he would go many miles to hear a piece of music. Cooke died in 1672, and Pelham Humphries became master of "the children."

Both these were written for and introduced before the Neapolitan public. In these works he reached his highest development, and by them he is best known to fame. The opera-story of "La Sonnambula," by Romani, an accomplished writer and scholar, is one of the most artistic and effective ever put into the hands of a composer.

"This one," said he, "is a poor composer who would like to rise from song-writing to opera, and cannot. He blames the managers, music-sellers, everybody, in fact, but himself, and he has no worse enemy. You can see what a florid complexion, what self-conceit, how little firmness in his features! he is made to write ballads.

Every year strengthened the bond of friendship between myself and the nobly-gifted composer, Hartmann: art and the freshness of nature prospered in his house. Collin was my counsellor in practical life, and Oersted in my literary affairs. The theatre was, if I may so say, my club. I visited it every evening, and in this very year I had received a place in the so-called court stalls.

Starving and destitute, the happy idea occurred to our hero to try and earn something by his voice. He applied to Siboni, the Director of the Music School, and was admitted to his presence whilst the latter was at dinner. Fortunately for Hans, Baggersen the poet and Weyse the celebrated composer were of the party, so for their amusement the boy was asked to sing and recite.

Whatever effect Venice, with its weird and mysterious beauty, with its marble palaces, façades, pillars, and domes, its magnificent shrines and frescoes, produced on Handel, he took Venice by storm. Handel's power as an organist and a harpsichord player was only second to his strength as a composer, even when, in the full zenith of his maturity, he composed the "Messiah" and "Judas Maccabæus."