; there is spread over his music the twilight of eternal loss and eternal extravagant hope⁠—the same light in which Europe was bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, when it danced round the Tree of Liberty of the Revolution, and finally almost fell down in adoration before Napoleon. But how rapidly does this very sentiment now pale, how difficult nowadays is even the apprehension of this sentiment, how strangely does the language of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, and Byron sound to our ear, in whom collectively the same fate of Europe was able to speak , which knew how to sing in Beethoven!⁠—Whatever German music came afterwards, belongs to Romanticism, that is to say, to a movement which, historically considered, was still shorter, more fleeting, and more superficial than that great interlude, the transition of Europe from Rousseau to Napoleon, and to the rise of democracy. Weber⁠—but what do