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is as satisfactory in externals as in content.

The many readers who felt in "Vagrom Verse" that natural spontaneous mingling of humor and tenderness which goes straight to the heart will welcome a second volume by Charles Henry Webb (John Paul). "With Lead and Line" includes too many poems of merely personal or occasional interest for the best popular effect, but it contains some verses which will rival those in the earlier volume. Especially noticeable are "Gran'ther's Gun," a reminiscence of the Lexington fight, andin quite another vein-"Dum Vivimus Vigilemus." Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

In an earnest and readable volume entitled "The Hand of God in American History," Dr. Robert Ellis Thompson seeks to turn the minds of his readers from the secondary causes which usually engage the attention of historians to the thought of God's immediate agency in guiding the destinies of the American people. Beginning with the discovery of the continent and coming down to the problems of to-day, he points to evidences of providential aid and interposition. This is certainly a broad and inspiring view, and it should be reassuring to those who are sometimes tempted to ignore or forget the "increasing purpose" that runs through the ages. Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.

Mrs. Catherine Crowe's "The Night Side of Nature" made a great stir when it was first published nearly sixty years ago. Each age has its own ghosts, and the literature of the occult has multiplied so rapidly of late, and there are so many new things in the way of spiritual manifestations that Mrs. Crowe's ghostly figures may seem a bit antiquated, to some tastes. But the wide interest in psychic phenomena has led

Henry T. Coates & Co. to publish a new edition of her book, with an introduction by Thomas Jay Hudson, LL.D., who takes Mrs. Crowe with extreme gravity.

The recent death of Aubrey de Vere has recalled and set anew in circulation these playful lines which Tennyson once wrote in acceptance of a volume of Aubrey de Vere's poems:

"Little Aubrey in the West! little Alfred in the East

Accepts the songs you gave, and he sends you his salaam;

And he prays that you may live. But as Earth her orbit runs, Little Homer, little Dante, little Shakespeare! can they last

In the vast

Of the rolling of the æons, of the changes of the suns?

Little poet, hear the little poet's epigram!"

The view of the historical Christ which Annie Besant takes in her volume on "Esoteric Christianity" is that he was a glorious being belonging to the great spiritual hierarchy that guides the spiritual evolution of humanity, who used for three years the human body of the disciple Jesus. For something over fifty years after his physical departure, according to Mrs. Besant, he visited his disciples in his subtle spiritual body, training them in a knowledge of occult truths, they meanwhile remaining together, for the most part, in a retired spot on the outskirts of Judea. This is an account of the beginnings of Christianity somewhat widely variant from that usually accepted, but it furnishes Mrs. Besant a good point of departure for a detailed if not particularly illuminating exposition of what she calls the "lesser mysteries" of Christianity. John Lane, publisher.

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I.

Grillparzer himself would perhaps have protested against the double title here assigned him, for though equally enamored of music and of poetry, it was his constant aim, as we shall see, to confound to separate rather than them. But his protest would have been vain, for poetry and music are intimately blended in all his works, and yet more so in the nature and genius of the man.

A practical musician, pianist and The arcomposer, he certainly was.

chives of the "Societé des Amis de la Musique" at Vienna contain several manuscript books of his exercises in numbered bass, harmony and counterpoint. M. Hanslick saw not long since at the house of Caroline Frölich, the life-long friend of the poet, three of Grillparzer's compositions. The first was the famous Ode of Horace-"Integer vitae scelerisque purus"-arranged for bass voices with piano accompaniment; then there was a song written for Heine's verses, "Du schönes Schiffermadchen," the style of which reminded M. Hanslick both of Haydn and Mozart, and finally a strong, impassioned aria for a bass voice, adapted Translated for The Living Age.

to the words: "Life is a combat-a war without a truce."

Grillparzer therefore, as the phrase goes, "possessed" music; but even more truly may it be said that music possessed him, and was a powerful adjunct often to his poetical inspirations. The first idea of his trilogy of "The Golden Fleece" came to him while playing the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. He was just then leaving for Italy and, before he came back, the fleeting conception seemed quite to have disappeared. But the symphonies again-more faithful even than he revived the memory of what they had originally suggested. Music is frequently introduced into the dramas and tragedies of Grillparzer. Sometimes it envelops them like an atmosphere; sometimes it penetrates them through and through. We feel it in that lyrical quality, which leaps from the lips of his characters in a gush of harmonious words. "Sappho," "Libussa," "The Waves," are true lyric dramas. Essentially musical is the emotion of those juvenile souls, just wakening to the sense of love, whose vague trouble is betrayed by a subdued murmur before it finds voice in words which appeal to the intelligence. There is music in the solitary reveries of

Hero; in the dim desires and wistful aspirations, the penumbra whereof the peet will not illumine by analysis, but whose voiceless utterance he compels us to hear. There is music everywhere in the rôle of Rodolph II, who discerns the harmony of the spheres. There is music finally in Grillparzer's very diction, which may not indeed, boast the dry precision of an instruinent of pure thought, but has always the subtle and persuasive charm of a voice that speaks to the soul.

The truth is that Grillparzer was initiated into poetry by music. As he himself said once to Beethoven: "It was music that taught me to apprehend melody in verse." Gratitude, no less than inborn inclination, led him in all his works as a writer, both of prose and poetry, to assign a great and splendid part to musical effect. He studied literary composition, both musically and philosophically; he adorned it as a poet, a thinker and a lover. Among the illustrious composers, with whom he was contemporary, or nearly So, there were some like Mozart and Schubert, whom he fully comprehended; others, like Beethoven, whom he understood partially; others again like Weber, and afterward Wagner, whom he found unintelligible and was ready to declare accursed. But no one of our great writers-not even Jean Jacques Rousseau-has ever appreciated music as music more thoroughly, or loved it more passionately than he. One other writer only, M. Hanslick, the author of "The Poor Musician," has gone so deeply into the mysterious life of sound as to have made of it his own domain. To the very end of his long life Grillparzer found in music the utmost possible delight of the senses, the heart and the mind. Music was his most faithful companion, and his sweetest comforter, linked to his destiny no less than to his genius. Of him it has been well

said by Berger, that "the first and present inspirations of his muse came to him in the form of melody without words. To these he lent an attentive ear translating and transposing them into poetic language. The ultimate source and final end of his poetic endeavor was that dreamy and delicious mood of mind which diffuses its thrilling sweetness over all the air, like the soft vibration of those echoes which return to us from spaces remote and unseen. At the point where music and poetry meet, we feel the pulsation of his heart."

II.

Grillparzer was born in 1791-the year when Mozart died-and he lived till 1872, at which period almost all the works of Wagner had been given to the world. Few men have survived a period so long and so important in the history of musical art. Eighty years are almost an age in the mere evolution of time; in that of the ideal they represent a period that seems infinite. Can we wonder that, broad as his mind was, he did not take in the whole epoch; that even an eye-witness of changes and contradictions so great should have failed fully to comprehend and entirely to accept them?

Franz Grillparzer was born in Vienna, of a musical family, in a musical city. His mother, Anna Sonnleithner, who "lived and breathed music," was the daughter of a jurist with whom music was a passion, and the sister of two men whose names are eminent in the history of music and the drama in Austria. Both Haydn and Mozart were frequent guests in that house. The child's first music-teacher was his mother, and he found her lessons so irksome that he came near throwing up the pursuit altogether. From those too nervous maternal hands

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singular tuition of a Bohemian artist, Johann Mederitsch, surnamed Gallus. An admirable contrapuntist but lazy and indifferent, Gallus gave a few marvellous lessons, merely to escape starvation. Half the lesson hour he consumed in playing with his pupil, not à quatre mains on the piano, but à quatre pattes, under it. But the other half was devoted to improvisations to which Madame Grillparzer listened in ecstasy.

The method cannot have been so bad a one, after all, for little Franz made great progress. His first compliment, as he himself has told us, came from the cook. "The execution of Louis XVI was then fresh in the memory of all, and among other exercises I had been made to learn a march which was said to have been played when he was on the way to the guillotine. At a certain point in the second part of this composition, I had to let my finger slide over an octave to represent the fall of the knife, and when the old woman heard me she burst into tears and refused to listen any longer."

Notwithstanding this domestic success, the child showed a much more decided taste for the violin than for the piano. His parents would keep him, however, to the detested instrument; and one night when he and his brother were to have "shown off" before the company in the paternal drawing-room, Franz tried to escape the nuisance by running away, and hiding in a remote bed-chamber. Whereupon his father, who was never to be trifled with, stopped his music-lessons altogether.

It was not until after the lapse of seven or eight years-which cannot have been very happy ones, either for the boy or his parents-that Grillparzer once more opened the instrument which he had by this time forgiven. "I had forgotten everything," he says, "even my notes. But luckily my old master

Gallus had taught me, more in jest than in earnest, something about numbered bars, and given me some notion of the principal chords. I loved harmony, my chords resolved themselves naturally, and I made simple melodies." Grillparzer always played thus, out of his own head, and he could go on improvising for hours together. Later he studied counterpoint, "and then," he says, "I could compose and develop more satisfactorily, but the true inspiration was gone forever."

It was a source of keen regret to him that he came too late to have seen Mozart; but Schubert he knew, and better still Beethoven, with whom as is well known, he came rather near collaborating. In a poem dedicated to the composer of the "Roi des Aulnes" he emphatically asserts, though without proceeding to define, the originality of Schubert's genius. "Schubert is my name! I am Schubert! Take me for what I am! I do homage to the works of the old masters. I revere them; but nothing of their works shall enter into mine. Praise me and I shall be glad; blame me, and I will endure your censure. Schubert is my name! I am Schubert!" To the composer, as a man, Grillparzer alludes but once. He describes him seated at the piano in the house of the charming sisters Frölich, which was an asylum for Grillparzer himself as long as he lived. Kate, the one whom he loved best, was sitting close beside Schubert, deeply moved, almost intoxicated by the sounds he was producing. "His more poignant passages seemed to occasion her such anguish that some one called out to him to stop. But the cruel discords resolved themselves into serene harmonies, and the eyes of the charming girl, which had been brimming with tears, became bright once more with a gladness like that of sunshine after rain."

Very different, and much more con

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