[1]
Some music is above me; most music is beneath me. I like Beethoven and
Mozart--or else some of the aerial compositions of the elder Italians, as
Palestrina[2] and Carissimi.--And I love Purcell.
The best sort of music is what it should be--sacred; the next best, the
military, has fallen to the lot of the Devil.
Good music never tires me, nor sends me to sleep. I feel physically
refreshed and strengthened by it, as Milton says he did.
I could write as good verses now as ever I did, if I were perfectly free
from vexations, and were in the _ad libitum_ hearing of fine music, which
has a sensible effect in harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as
it were, lubricating my inventive faculty. The reason of my not finishing
Christabel is not, that I don't know how to do it--for I have, as I always
had, the whole plan entire from beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I
could not carry on with equal success the execution of the idea, an
extremely subtle and difficult one.
Besides, after this continuation of Faust, which they tell me is very poor,
who can have courage to attempt[3] a reversal of the judgment of all
criticism against continuations? Let us except Don Quixote, however,
although the second part of that transcendant work is not exactly _uno
flatu_ with the original conception.
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