high ideals which should lead to the most constant, strenuous, yet cordial devotion to their work, were ends which he never ceased to cherish and promote. He could not restrict his interest to his own department, important as that might be. His generous mind embraced the whole work of the school, and sought by sympathetic co-operation to promote its entire efficiency.

But back of the teacher was the man. Underlying his great professional usefulness was a character as rare as it was beautiful, a character whose leading traits were manifest to all who shared his friendship. Strong in the conscious purity of his intentions, he had nothing to conceal. He believed in the truth-in its divinity, its invincibleness, its imperishable vitality; and hence his honest convictions were presented with a refreshing frankness and manly freedom. Yet this frankness was joined with such extreme modesty that it was with difficulty he could be persuaded to accept positions or discharge offices which would bring him into personal prominence.

The intenseness of his emotional nature, tempered by a mature and sober judgment, gave great beauty to his spiritual life. He could appreciate to the full the heart-side of religious experience. Those portions of the divine word which expressed the Gospel in its richest invitations and privileges stirred his spirit to its depths. The unseen world was to him an every-day reality; its mysteries were in his most familiar thoughts. And so in his company, as one of his students well expressed it, there was the strange sense of other-worldedness. His very presence was a benediction, and his daily life an unspoken prayer. It is not surprising that death was disarmed in the presence of such a soul.

Respecting his personal religious life his pastor testified at his funeral:

He was a humble and devout Christian, of simple faith and unwavering trust in God for a full and a present salvation. Regular in his attendance on the public service and on the prayermeeting, he was an attentive hearer, and his prayers and testimonies were marked with great earnestness and simplicity. Quietly, unobtrusively, he has moved among us as a holy man, most exemplary in his life and character, desiring above all things to be a true servant of God, and leading men to love him because of his blameless life and Christian friendship. He illustrated in an eminent degree the harmony of extensive learning with a humble piety.

Such was the career and the Christian character of Henry Bannister. He lived well, and died well; and dying in life's early afternoon, he enriched the Church by his good name.

ART. II.-STRUGGLES AND ROMANCE OF A GENIUSBERLIOZ.

[The history of genius affords warnings of dangers to be guarded against quite as largely as incentives to high endeavors; and often the most em,inent successes are associated with faults and failures that more than counterbalance all these. The account here given very clearly displays the undesirableness of that kind of genius which manifests itself in the excessive development of certain forms of taste and artistic impulse, while the less brilliant but incomparably more worthy qualities of mind and heart are neglected. Berlioz was certainly a rare genius; but who would choose to be like him, as a man? And yet all that is really excellent in genius is quite compatible with moral and social worth.]

OUR title assumes that Berlioz was a genius. That he was such, "more or less," will hardly now be denied by the most pertinacious of his many hostile critics. In the most disputed of his compositions can be found passages of such power and beauty as could proceed only from a mind of real genius, though that they have faults, sometimes glaring faults, need not be denied. Hardly has there been a notable man in the history of music who was pursued by more unrelenting critical persecution; but since his death, his works have been daily attaining ascendency among his countrymen, so long reluctant to acknowledge his claims, and he now seems destined to become one of the art idols of the French capital.

He is now acknowledged to be the greatest of musical “instrumentalists;" but it was precisely for this superiority that he was so persistently criticised. The great musician is a great poet. For what is music if it is not poetry-poetry in sound-an attempt to turn the very atmosphere of the planet into an organ for poetical recitation and rapture? And this auricular poetry (if it may be so called) is as genuine as poetry on paper-not only rhythmical in intonation, as written poetry is rhythmical in phrase, but, like written poetry, expressive of sentiment and scene, of character and action. Berlioz insisted that, by sufficient instruments and their right collocation, orchestral effects might be made as expressive as written poetry, and nearly if not quite as much so as the scenic representations of the stage. If his theory needs some qualification, it is, nevertheless, essentially true; he practically dem

onstrated it before most of Europe, and died victorious over his critics. And what conception could more elevate and ennoble instrumental music?

Beethoven confounded his critical enemies by his "Symphony on the Battle of Vittoria," in which (anticipating Berlioz's theory) he demonstrated the possibility of expressing, by orches tral effects-by sounds-the scenes of a combat. A contemporary journal (the "Leipsic Music Gazette ") acknowledged his victory with some surprise. "The effect and the illusion were complete," it said, "and it can be affirmed, without reserve, that there exists not in the domain of imitative music a work similar to this." This theory of instrumental imitative music, more or less intuitively anticipated by all great masters of the art, was, we repeat, the chief offense of Berlioz-his capital heresy. The critics, who at first proscribed him as a selfconceited and talentless innovator, were compelled, in time, to acknowledge that he was not quite talentless, though an unpardonable heretic. Like Beethoven, he has triumphed, in his main heresy at least; and not a few good judges esteem him an "epochal" man in music, for, in respect to instrumentation, he initiated something like a revolution in the history of the art.

He was, then, we need not hesitate to say, a man of genius. Apart from his merits as a composer, he had the virtues and the vices of genius of the "artistic temperament." He was passionate, capricious, romantic, amorous, self-reliant, and world-defiant; a man whose soul was wholly possessed by his ideal-his ideal of life as well as of art. He was fierce in his resentments, and fought out, unfalteringly, the contest with his critics. But he had a warm and a profound heart, and by its instincts he conceived his noblest thoughts, his best ideals; for, as Vauvenargues says, "Great thoughts come from the heart." Inevitably such a man's life must be one of struggles. The whole career of Berlioz was a bravely sustained fight against formidable trials; and it is these chiefly that we propose here to record. Their lessons are far from pessimistic; they teach, in a manner seldom seen in any one human life, the power of determined will, and the invincibility of right ideas-their ul timate, their predestined, success. Whatever the reader may think of alleged defects in his music, we are sure he cannot, after our brief study of his life, decline to acknowledge him

a hero as well as a genius. And is there any higher ideal of intellectual life than genius combined with heroism?

His trials began with the first revelations of his genius. He was born on December 11, 1803, and was a born musician. His little native town on a hill-side (Côte Saint-André, not far from Lyons) was not without rural charms. It afforded him views of the distant Alps, and throughout his life he was vividly susceptible of the poetry of scenery. While yet a child he heard a hymn in a convent which awoke his musical instinct. "I saw heaven open," he says, "a heaven a thousand times more pure and more beautiful than that of which I had heard so much. It was my first musical impression." Before his tenth year he had learned, in the solitude of his mountain home, to sing "at first sight," and to play two instruments; and in his twelfth year he studied "composition." A romantic incident, which colored his whole remaining life, occurred in this year. On a visit to his grandparents, at Meylen, he saw, for the first time, his "Estelle." She was a young lady of eighteen years, of mature beauty, "elegant and tall, with great eyes always smiling, hair that might have ornamented the helmet of Achilles, Parisienne feet," etc. The boy was smitten, through his whole being, with a pure, an ideal passion-one of those poetic or Platonic passions which not a few men of genius have precociously experienced. With most it is a brief episode, and is remembered as a charming dream; with Berlioz it never ceased to be a reality. "The romantic vertigo seized me," he wrote in his old age, "and has never left me." He suffered profoundly; Estelle divined his secret, and, hoping it would be transient, endeavored to relieve him by womanly caresses. "I hoped nothing," he says, "I understood nothing; but my heart experienced inexpressible suffering. I passed entire nights in desolation." Seventeen years later he attempted to find her, and had a brief yet passionate glimpse of her, but she was then a wife and mother. After sixteen years more he learned her address, and sent her a letter, but received no reply. When both of them were old he sought her again, as we shall see, with all the ardor of his first love, and her sympathetic interest for him consoled his last years. This incident is worth alluding to here, as it prompted his genius. He read with enthusiasm (" hundreds of times," he says)

Florian's pastoral, "Estelle et Nemorin," because of its name; and some of his earliest and hardest studies were an attempt to make an opera of it. The image of Estelle was ever before him, beckoning him onward. A once fainous Scotch critic, Lord Kames, said that we should never speak of our disappointments in love, for the world cannot sympathize with such griefs; on the contrary, it always sees something ridiculous in them. Berlioz thought otherwise, and seems never tired of alluding to this romance of his childhood. It was his first trial, and doubtless he deemed it one of his greatest; but, by its genial and prolonged influence upon him, it may be considered one of his greatest blessings. After the interval of seventeen years between his first and second sight of Estelle, though unrecognized by her at the time, he turned away, he says, exclaiming in his heart, "Estelle! still beautiful! Estelle! the nymph, the hamadryad of Saint Eynard, of the green hills of Meylen." "I returned," he adds, "all vibrant with emotion." He sought relief in music. He discovered an old flageolet among some rubbish of his home, and, after distracting the family with it for two days, he had mastered a "heroic chant." He was soon composing duets, trios, and quartets. He wrote a "Pot-pourri" on Italian themes, and then a quintet for the flute and violins, alto and bass, which was successfully played by himself and some friendly amateurs. "It was a triumph," he writes, "my father alone not sharing in the applause." "All my compositions were tinged with a profound melancholy, all in the minor key. I could not avoid it; my romantic love swayed my feelings. In this state of my soul, reading without ceasing Florian's Estelle,' I proposed to put some of its episodes into music, and failed not to do so." He read the lives of Gluck and Haydn with great agitation. "What glory," he exclaimed, "what beautiful art, what happiness to cultivate it as a great master!"

His next trial, if less romantic, was to be more real, for it was to agonize his best filial instincts. His good mother was a Catholic devotee, and could not conceive of the musical profession but as implying frivolity of life and the dissipation of the Parisian opera and theaters. To allow her boy to be trained for it was to consign him over to perdition in both worlds. His father was a physician, the Hippocrates of the