introduction, giving a most pleasing account of his own devotion to the Master. Schindler was the trusty friend of Beethoven, and one whom he himself elected to write his biography. Inadequate as it is, there is that fidelity in the collection of materials which makes it serviceable to our knowledge of Beethoven, and we wish it might be reprinted in America. Though there is little knowledge of music here, yet so far as any exists in company with a free development of mind, the music of Beethoven is the music which delights, which awakens, which inspires, an infinite hope.

This influence of these most profound, bold, original and singular compositions, even upon the uninitiated, above those of a simpler construction and more obvious charms, we have observed with great pleasure. For we think its cause lies deep, far beneath fancy, taste, fashion, or any accidental cause.

It is because there is a real and steady unfolding of certain thoughts which pervade the civilized world. They strike their roots through to us beneath the broad Atlantic; and these roots shoot stems upward to the light wherever the soil allows them free course.

Our era, which permits of freer inquiry, of bolder experiment, than ever before, and a firmer, broader, basis, may also, we sincerely trust, be depended on for nobler discovery and a grander scope of thought.

Although we sympathize with the sadness of those who lament the decay of forms and methods round which so many associations have wound their tendrils, and understand the sufferings which gentle, tender natures undergo from the forlorn homelessness of a period of doubt, speculation, reconstruction in every way, yet we cannot disjoin ourselves, by one moment's fear or regret, from the advance corps. That body, leagued by an invisible tie, has received too deep an assurance that the spirit is not dead nor sleeping, to look back to the past, even if they must advance uniformly through scenes of decay and the rubbish of falling edifices.

But how far it is from being so! How many developments, in various ways, of truth! How manifold the aspirations of love! In the church the attempt is now to reconstruct on the basis proposed by its founder—"Love one another;" in the philosophy of mind, if completeness of system is, as yet, far from being attained, yet mistakes and vain dogmas are set aside, and examinations conducted with intelligence and an enlarged discernment of what is due both to God and man. Science advances, in some route with colossal strides; new glimpses are daily gained into 

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