A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. l\9 



open the piano, and she sits down and begins one 

 of Schubert's Vier Impromptus. There is nothing 

 to debate upon in Mrs. Lydia's art, so long as she 

 is playing ; there is not time, till she has done, to 

 think how perfect it is. When the last note is still, 

 I fall into speculations concerning the distinction 

 between music and art of form or colour ; how the 

 one sense, maimed and shrunken, exists with the 

 other glorified. I remember the curious complexity 

 of Mrs. Lydia's gift ; how she seems to be free of 

 the spell she lays on others, talking and laughing 

 through the tenderest air, as though the fingers did 

 it all ; how she seems to have no choice, playing, 

 often in incongruous connection, Chopin, Balfe, 

 Schumann, Gade, Handel ; how, the Rector has 

 told me, she sometimes does not play for a 

 month together, or only fingers over some trite 

 hymn-tune in odd twilight half-hours, something 

 reminiscent of child's Sundays, of Confirmation 

 Day, perhaps. 



After the Impromptus she played us a Chaconne 

 and then a Minuetto ; and as the pathetic recurrent 

 phrase filled the quiet room, it was easy to understand 

 the power of music, wider, simpler, incomparably 

 more moving than the art of the eyes ; easy to under- 

 stand the cast of mind to which the matching of 



