Repentance." Still on the whole we may say (and even these pictures are not altogether exceptions to the rule) that something of mistake mixes in most upward-looking devotion as George Eliot paints it. That devotion of which all such is a feeble prophecy and type, must therefore take the very centre and focus of error.

Must one who feels this severance of love of man from faith in God, the great misfortune of our time, yet allow that the thing that is left acquires, for the moment, a sudden influx of new energy by the very fact of its severance? It would not be looking facts fairly in the face to deny that the genius of George Eliot seems to show such a result. Nor is there any real difficulty in making the concession. A bud may open more quickly in water in a warm room than on its parent stem, although thus the seed will never ripen. We may transfer conviction to a more genial atmosphere at the very moment we sever it from its root, and we must wait long to discover that the life that is quickened in it is also threatened. The love of God has often seemed opposed to the love of man. There is no love that may not oppose any or every other for a time. We all see conjugal set itself against filial affection; a new passion drain off the energy from old and familiar attachments. Such of us as are wise are prepared for the inevitable loss in all change, even if the change is gain on the whole; such of us as are schooled by long experience know that the loss is only temporary.

"The love of one, from which there doth not spring

The love of all, is but a worthless thing," sang the only Englishwoman who could be compared to George Eliot in genius, and who in the love of which she sings was more fortunate. The mother who bends over the cradle for the first time feels all other love chilled for the moment by the sudden rush toward this mighty magnet, but the seed of a deeper love than she has ever yet known for those who bent over hers lies hid in that which seems to crush it. But a seed takes long to develop. What we feel most at the moment, perhaps at all events if we are the losers by it is the expulsive power of a new affection."

And

And conversely what may be most apparent at the moment that faith in God expires may be the sudden release of a mystic fervor which has all to be employed in the service of man. This, we believe, is what was felt, oftenest unconsciously, in the writings of George Eliot. "What I look to," she once said, "is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and as irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something firm if I am falling ;" and the eloquent gesture with which she grasped the mantelpiece as she spoke, remains in the memory as the expression of a sort of transmuted prayer. now the look and the tones recur not only as one of the most valued passages in a valued chapter of memory, but as a sort of gathering up, in a noble but mutilated aspiration, of the ideal given by a lofty genius to the world. What the many felt in her writings was the glow of this desire, what they missed was its mutilation. We have often wished that the latter had been more distinct. Her detaching influence from the true anchorage of humanity would have been less potent, we think, had it been received consciously. There was no lack of distinctness in it, at all events, to her hearers. Perhaps there may be some to whom these works have brought nothing but the glow of an emotion to which their own mind supplied the hidden belief which to them could alone justify it. But on the whole we cannot doubt that her convictions cut through this sheath of emotion, and made their keen edge felt on many a mind and many a heart.

Can genius be indeed the barren and desolate eminence which we must consider it if they alone to whom it is. granted have no object for reverence? Can it be that the ordinary mass of average mankind-the stupid, animal, indolent crowd-have exercise for this elevating faculty whenever they lift their eyes, and that all who soar into a purer region must look downward when they would find anything to love? We know well how George Eliot would have answered the question with her lips. But with her life, and still more in her death, she gives us a different answer. They who occupy the mountain peaks of human thought may preach to us that

these mountain peaks are all, and then, in their potent imagination, make the immensity of the plain below a substitute for the superior heights that they alone lack. But all our instincts tell us that goodness and power would become misfortunes if they lifted man into a region where he had nothing above him. The bereavement which we feel as one and another depart from us cannot be the abiding portion of those who have enriched their kind. "Fame promises in gold and pays in silver," said George Eliot once to the present writer. Not fame alone, but that lofty hope, that inspirer of ardent effort, which confers the power to despise fame-though it often also confers fame itself-would, if

we must accept some parts of her creed, have promised in gold and paid in lead.

But we cannot bid her farewell with words of divergence. She has quickened life as much as any of those who have rendered it more turbid; she has purified it as much as many who have arrested or slackened its flow. It is a solemn thought that such an one has passed away-so solemn that the debt of a large individual gratitude seems to disappear in the common emotion which it but intensifies and typifies. Her death unites us as her life did, perhaps even more, for we listened to her voice with various feelings, and there is only one with which we learn that it has ceased forever.-Contemporary Review.

FRANZ LISZT is one of the few living representatives of that great upheaval of ideas known as the Romantic movement of 1830.

Abroad the new aspirations, cramped in politics, found their solace and ideal fulfilment in the realms of literature and of art. The names of Georges Sand, Alfred de Musset, M. Lamartine, and Hugo; of De Lamennais in religion; of Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner, in music, are but so many expressions of that suppressed excitement of new life which found its chief vent in literature and art on the Continent, and gave us a new burst of painting and poetry, and the Reform Bill, in England.

The new spirit, the "Zeitgeist," the young Impulse, of the nineteenth century, now grown to maturity, was then abroad and busy in overturning king doms and theories of art, philosophy, and religion with rigorous impartiality.

There are few survivals of that stirring and romantic epoch. Liszt is among them. Once the idol of every capital in the civilized world as an executive musician, he was placed years ago on an unapproachable pedestal.

Few among us even who have reached middle life, have heard him play; he belongs to the epoch of Paganini, Malibran, and Lablache-not to

the epoch of Titiens, Joachim, and Rubinstein. To have heard him is to have heard a man who in the beginning of this century as completely transformed the school of pianoforte-playing as did Paganini the school of violin-playing. The Liszt method has profoundly influenced even the severer clique of classical experts in Germany; and the greatness and foresight of Liszt is evidenced in the fact that no pianoforte development since has in the least outgrown the impulse given it by him nearly fifty years ago; nor as executants can even Rubinstein or Bülow claim to have done more than offer successive illustrations of the great master's method and manner.

As 1 drove through the groves of olives brightening with crude berries that clothe the slopes of Tivoli, and entered the gateway which leads up to the ducal Villa d'Este, it was with something of the feeling of a pilgrim who approaches a shrine. Two massive doors open on to a monastic cloister, and the entrance to the villa itself is out of the cloisters, just as the rooms are entered from the cloister of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Here for six years past in the autumn Liszt has led a retired life, varied by occasional excursions to Rome.

I was conducted up a staircase which

opened on to a lofty terrace, and thence into a side room, while the Swiss valet disappeared to summon the Abbate Liszt. In another moment I saw a side door open, and the venerable figure of Liszt, already for years engraven on my heart, advanced toward me.

It was the same noble and commanding form-with the large finely-chiselled features, the restless glittering eye, still full of untamed fire, the heavy white hair, thick mantling on the brow and cropped square only where it reached the shoulders, down which I can well imagine it might have continued to flow unchecked like a snowy cataract.

He came forward with that winning smile of bonhomie which at once invites cordiality, and drew me to him with both hands, conducting me at once into a little inner sitting-room with a window opening on to the distant Campagra.

The room was dark, and completely furnished with deep red damask-cool and shadowy contrast to the burning sunshine of Italy. After alluding to our last meeting in Wagner's house at Bayreuth, which recalled also the name of Walter Bache, who has worked so bravely for Liszt's music in England, he said, "Now tell me, how is Bache? I have a particular, quite particular, regard for Bache; he stayed with me here some years ago, and he has been very steadfast in presenting my works in England; and tell me, how is Victor Hugo? and have you seen Renan lately?" I was overwhelmed by these inquiries and the like. I could not give him very good accounts of M. Hugo, whose health I feared was declining; but I said that the last evening I had spent with him in Paris, he had received up to twelve at night, and seemed full of life; although his hours are much earlier now. Of M. Renan I could of course speak much more fully, as he had so recently been in England. Renan took me to M. Hugo's when I was in Paris, and we had a delightful evening," he remarked. After asking after a few other personal friends, he said, "I am glad to see you here. At this time I have a little more leisure. I escape to this retreat for rest. At Rome I am besieged (obsédé) by all sorts of people, with whom I do not care to entertain particular relations-why NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXIII., No. 4

should I? what have we in common?— they come out of curiosity to stare, that is all; and even here I am worried with callers, who have no interest for me;" and indeed it was current in Rome that the Abbate Liszt would receive no one at Tivoli; and especially ladies were not admitted.

The

I could not help admiring the situation of the Villa d'Este. Indeed,' said Liszt, “this is quite a princely residence; it is rented by the Cardinal Hohenlöhe, with whom I have had very old and friendly relations; he is good enough to apportion it to me in the autumn; you see his picture hangs there. place is quite a ruin. It belongs to the Duke of Modena, but of course they can't keep it up now: the Cardinal spent about £2000 to make it habitable. You shall see presently, the terraces are rather rough; I don't often go about the place, but I will come out with you now, and show you some points of view. I lunch about one o'clock; you will stay, and put up with the hospitalité de garçon.

He then led me to the window. Down the slope of a precipitous mountain stretched the Villa d'Este gardens; tall cypress-trees marked the lines of walk and terrace; groves of olive, between which peeped glittering cascades and lower parterres, studded here and there with a gleaming statue, and tall jets of water, eternally spouting, fed from the Marcian springs; the extremity of the park seemed to fade away, at an immense depth, into the billowy Campagna.

It was like an enchanted scene; from the contemplation of which I was roused by the Abbate taking my arm, and, passing through several antechambers, we emerged on to the raised terrace, which commanded one of the most striking views in Italy, or the world.

"Round to the left," said Liszt, "lies Hadrian's Villa, and perhaps your eyes are good enough to see St. Peter's yonder in the horizon." The gray mist hung at a distance of eighteen miles over the straggling buildings of distant Rome; but they gleamed out here and there. Beyond these wooded flanks of the mountain; beyond the ruins of villas where Mæcenas and Horace and the Antonines held their revels; beyond

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the rushing murmur of cascades and fountain; never silent, yet ever making a low and slumbrous melody, lay the Campagna like a vast lake, over which the shadow of cloud and the flicker of sunlight swept and faded out; and again beyond the Campagna, loomed the Eternal City with its mighty dome.

We seemed lifted into the upper air, as on the spacious summit of a lofty precipice; the dry vine leaves hung about the trellised parapets, and the Virginian creeper was just beginning to

turn.

Liszt was silent. As I looked at the noble and expressive features, never quite in repose, and strongly marked with the traces of those immense emotions which have been embodied by him in his great orchestral preludes, and thundered by him through every capital in Europe, in the marvellous performances of his earlier days, I could not help saying, "If you do not find rest here, you will rest nowhere on earth;" it was indeed a realm of unapproachable serenity and peace. Then we descended by winding ways, pausing in the long walk, thickly shaded with olive-trees and the beloved ilex, where fifty lions' heads spout fifty streams into an ancient moss-grown tank.

"It is," said Liszt, "a retreat for summer; you can walk all day about these grounds, and never fear the sunall is shade. But come down lower;" and so we went, at times turning round to look down an avenue, or catch, through the trees, a peep of the glowing horizon beyond.

Presently we came to a central space, ded into by four tall cypress groves. Here, up from a round sheet of water in front of us, leapt four jets to an immense height; and here we rested, while the Abbate gave me some account of this Villa or Château d'Este, and its former owners, which differed not greatly from what may be found in most guidebooks.

As we reascended, the bell of Sta. Croce, in the tall campanile over the cloisters which form part of the Villa d'Este, rang out a quarter to one.

It was a bad bell, like most Italian bells, and I naturally alluded to the superiority of Belgian bells, above all

others. Rather to my surprise, Liszt said, 'Yes, but how are they played? I remember being much struck by the Antwerp carillon. I described to him the mechanism of the carillon clavecin and tambour, and reminded him that the Antwerp carillon was much out of tune, Bruges being superior, as well as of heavier calibre, and Mechlin bearing off the palm for general excellence. We stopped short on one of the terraces, and he seemed much interested with a description I gave him of a performance by the great carilloneur M. Denyn at Mechlin, and which reminded me of Rubinstein at his best. He expressed surprise when I alluded to Van den Gheyn's compositions for bells, laid out like regular fugues and organ voluntaries, and equal in their way to Bach or Handel, who were contemporaries of the great Belgian organist and carilloneur. But," he said, the Dutch have also good bells. I was once staying with the King in Holland, and I believe it was at Utrecht that I heard some bell music which was quite wonderful." I have listened myself to that Utrecht carillon, which is certainly superior, and is usually well handled.

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We had again reached the upper terrace, where the Abbate's midday repast was being laid out by his valet. It was a charming situation for lunch, commanding that wide and magnificent prospect to which I have alluded; but autumn was far advanced, there was a fresh breeze, and the table was ordered indoors. Meanwhile, Liszt laying his hand upon my arm, we passed through the library, opening into his bedroom, and thence to a little sitting-room (the same which commanded that view of the Campagna). Here stood his grand Erard piano. As we were talking of bells," he said, "I should like to show you an Angelus' which I have just written ;" and opening the piano he sat down. This was the moment which I had so often and so vainly longed for.

When I left England, it seemed to me as impossible that I should ever hear Liszt play, as that I should ever see Mendelssohn, who has been in his grave for thirty-three years. How few of the present generation have had this privilege! At Bayreuth I had hoped, but no opportunity offered itself, and it is

well known that Liszt can hardly ever be prevailed upon to open the piano in the presence of strangers. A favorite pupil, Polig, who was then with him at the Villa d'Este, told me he rarely touched the piano, and that he himself had seldom heard him-" but," he added with enthusiasm, when the master touches the keys, it is always with the same incomparable effect, unlike any one else always perfect."

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"You know," said Liszt, turning to me, they ring the Angelus' in Italy carelessly; the bells swing irregularly, and leave off, and the cadences are often broken up thus:" and he began a little swaying passage in the treble-like bells tossing high up in the evening air: it ceased, but so softly that the half-bar of silence made itself felt, and the listening ear still carried the broken rhythm through the pause. The Abbate himself seemed to fall into a dream; his fingers fell again lightly on the keys, and the bells went on, leaving off in the middle of a phrase. Then rose from the bass the song of the "Angelus, Angelus," or rather, it seemed like the vague emotion of one who, as he passes, hears in the ruins of some wayside cloister the ghosts of old monks humming their drowsy melodies, as the sun goes down rapidly, and the purple shadows of Italy steal over the land, out of the orange west!

We sat motionless-the disciple on one side, I on the other. Liszt was almost as motionless his fingers seemed quite independent, chance ministers of his soul. The dream was broken by a pause; then came back the little swaying passage of bells, tossing high up in the evening air, the half-bar of silence, the broken rhythm-and the "Angelus" was rung.

Luncheon being announced, we rose, and Liszt, turning to his young friend Polig, who occupies an apartment at Este, and enjoys the great master's help in his musical studies: Go, dear friend," he said, "and join us in about an hour-nay, sooner, if you will."

So we sat down in the cosily furnished little sitting-room-dark, like all the Abbate's suite of apartments, and evidently intended to shut out the sun.

I was still heated with our clambering walk, and Liszt insisted on my keeping on my great-coat, and provided

me in addition with a priest's silken skull-cap, playfully remarking, As you call me Abbate,' I shall address you as Il Reverendo,' and whenever you come here, you will find this priest's cap ready for you.

The "hospitalité de garçon" proved anything but ascetic. A vegetable soup, maccaroni with tomato sauce, a faultless beefsteak or "bistecco," dressed with fried mushrooms, cooked dry; a peculiar salad, composed of a variety of herbs in addition to leeks, onions, lettuce, and fruit, the like of which I can never hope to taste until I lunch again with the Abbate at the Villa d'Este.

We were alone. I need not say that, in such company, the wines seemed to me to possess an ideal fragrance and a Sicilian flavor wholly unlike and incomparably superior to the heavy vintages of Spain. There were some questions about Mendelssohn and Chopin that I had always wished to ask; but at first the conversation was much more general. We spoke of the curious recent fancy of the Italians for Wagner's music; the way his operas had been produced at Bologna, and just then Rienzi at Rome. "Yes," he said; "the Italians are beginning to understand more kinds of melody than one; they perceive, perhaps, that Wagner's melody pervades each part of his score, so that you can have a mélodie à plusieurs étages. This notion of "a melody in flats, or "' of several stories," struck me as most apt, as well as humorous. Speaking of Wagner, I related to him an unhappy occasion on which I had been requested by Lord

to try and prevail on Wagner, when in England, to accompany me to his house one night, where we were to meet a royal princess most anxious to see Wagner. I reluctantly undertook the mission, but failed to induce the great Maestro to go with me, and so was placed in the unpleasant position of having to apologize on my arrival for his absence. "Ah!" said Liszt, laughing, a similar thing occurred to me lately: some royalties at Sienna asked me to get Wagner to meet them; but I knew Wagner better, and at once declined to charge myself with that commission. Your mention of Lord reminds me that I knew him years ago; indeed, in my young days I was on one