It is all labor, task-work, drudgery, in the outset, which he performs reluctantly and without one thrill of delight, yet with the hope of some day becoming a musician. How stiff and clumsy his fingers are at first! How slowly and awkwardly they hobble over the keys, like a child just beginning to walk! How much more readily they go wrong than right! And he finds it vastly more difficult to practice the rules, than to commit them to memory. But he struggles on, sometimes hopeful, sometimes discouraged.
At last, by dint of patience and perseverance and much hard parctice, the difficulties are all overcome. The musical laws are incarnated in him. They flow out from the tips of his fingers the moment he seats himself at the instrument. He is now able to render with facility and effect the most difficult compositious of Beethoven or Mozart. And he finds, too, that by practicing, and thereby learning to give faithful expression to, the laws that govern in the realm of music, he becomes more and more enamored with the art. Strange and unlooked for raptures transport him. He is introduced, as it were, into a new world. Sweet melodies are rippling all around him. His soul is flooded with the charms of music. He experiences a delight in executing, or in listening to the execution of, some grand composition, of which, at the beginning of his musical education he could form no conception.
It is in this way that the musician is born; and in
