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WHERE I ADMIRE
I believe artists often do not know what they can do best : they are too conceited for that. Their atten tion is directed to something prouder than those little plants give promise of, which know how to grow up in actual perfection, new, rare, and beautiful, on their soil. The final excellency of their own garden and vineyard is superficially estimated by them, and their love and their insight are not of equal quality. There is a musi= I cian, who, more than any other, has the genius for find- I ing the tones peculiar to suflfering, oppressed, tortured / souls, and even for giving speech to dumb misery. No I one equals him in the colours of the late autumn, the indescribably pathetic happiness of a last, alder-last, alder-shortest enjoyment ; he knows a sound for those secretly haunted midnights of the soul when cause and e£fect seem to have gone out of joint and every instant something can originate out of nothing. He draws his resources best of all out of the lowest depth of human happiness, and as it were out of its drained goblet, where the bitterest and most nauseous drops have at the end — the good or the bad end — met with the sweetest. He knows that weary self-impelling of the soul which can no longer leap or fly, yea, not even
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