and then the phrase to the words "With thy fire intoxicated," &c., is used for:—
"All men are Brothers, where, sweet Joy,
Thy gentle wing is furl'd."
But, much worse—nay, absolutely shocking to the spiritual sense, is the persistent use of the same phrase, mediocre as it is, to these words:—
"Who that victory hath gained,
Of a friend, the friend to be;
Who a graceful wife hath gained
(This, too, should hardly be sung by women?)
Mix with ours his 'holy glee'; [C]
Yea, who calls but one soul his
In all this round of sea and land:
He who never knew that blessing
Steal in tears from this bright band."
Would it have been thought possible for Beethoven (Inspired Instinct), to set these last lines to the same—we are almost provoked to say, rattling jingle. To a lower deep, alas! our Beethoven-Hamlet could scarcely fall—
"Oh, what a sovereign mind is there o'erthrown!"
It was an incredible aboriginal mistake to set these lines to the same time, let alone same tune. Nor, indeed, can his choice of the words be considered happy. What made him in his grand old age (old for him) so harp upon Schiller's crude performance, we know not; nay, we ask whether a Beethoven should not have treated the glorious subject, Joy, when he was already young;—despise as he might (an egregious error) his earlier works. Had he at least undertaken it when he wrote the Symphony in D and the "Eroica"; or, in the "high and palmy state" of his powers, when he wrote the facile princeps C minor! Schiller's first words would alone repel us; he talks—"babbles" would be the strictly truer word, barbarously babbles—of joy, as that spark of the gods, and, in the same breath, daughter out of Elysium. How could he so talk of that grand abstract fact—Joy! Joy, the sunshine of the soul—whose glow, thence outwards, fills the Universe; life, absolute being; wherein alone we rightly, fully live. We have no patience with such barbarous metaphorising, such schoolboy personification, such hectic rapture! No wonder Beethoven failed, falling on such words as these.