This apparition was so bewildering to the senses, that in order not to become delirious I covered my ears and shut my eyes. Only then did the spook disappear, and as I looked again, I saw the poor Genoese in his normal form, making his normal bows and courtesies, as the audience applauded in the most enraptured way. ‘That is the famous playing on the G-string,’ remarked my neighbor; ‘I myself play the violin and I know what it is to master this instrument!’ Fortunately the intermission was not long, otherwise this musical fur-broker would have certainly enmeshed me in a long discussion over art. Paganini set the violin again calmly against his chin, and with the first stroke of his bow began again the wonderful transfiguration of the tones. Only these no longer took form so garishly colored and in determinate shapes. These tones unfolded themselves calmly, majestically surging and swelling, like an organ chorus in a cathedral; and everything around had expanded itself wider and higher to a colossal space, such as not the bodily eye, but rather only the eye of the spirit can grasp it.
In the middle of this space floated a shining orb, on which stood a gigantic and proudly sublime man, playing the violin. This orb, was it the sun? I don’t know. But in the characteristics of the man I recognized Paganini, only idealistically beautified, divinely transfigured, smiling in conciliation. His body bloomed in the most powerful manliness, a bright blue garment encompassed the ennobled limbs, about his shoulders flowed, in gleaming locks, the black hair; and how he stood so firmly and securely, a sublime god-image, and stroked the violin: it was if as all creation hearkened to his tones. He was the man-planet, around whom the universe moved, sounding with measured solemnity and and in blessed rhythm. These great lights, that, so calmly gleaming, hovered around him, were they the stars of the heavens, and that sounding harmony, that arose from their movements, was that the harmony of the spheres, whereof poets and seers have reported so much ecstasizing? At times, when I have strained to see far into the dawning distance, there I thought I saw pure white flowing garments, in which colossal pilgrims mutely wander around, with white staves in their hands and how extraordinary! the golden knobs on every staff were those same great lights, that I had taken for stars. These pilgrims proceeded in a vast circular path around the great performer, the golden knobs of their staves gleamed ever brighter from the tones of his violin, and the chorales that rang out from their lips and which I had taken for the harmony of the spheres, were actually only the ebbing echoes of those violin tones. An unnameable sacred fervor dwelt in these sounds, that often trembled scarcely audible, like the tones of a horn in the moonlight, and then finally roared out with unbridled jubilation, as if a thousand bards struck the strings of their harps and lifted their voices in a song of victory. Those were sounds that the ear never hears, but rather only the heart can dream of, when it rests during the night on the heart of its beloved. Perhaps the heart can grasp them in the bright daylight, if it sinks itself rejoicingly in the beauty lines and ovals of a Greek artwork…”
Great Quotes Every Day 