Studious persons also, pent up in narrow holes, breathing bad air, and stooping over their books, are much to be pitied. As they are debarred the free use of air and exercise, this I will venture to recommend as the best succedaneum to both; though it were to be wished that modern scholars would, like the ancients, meditate and converse more in walks and gardens and open air, which upon the whole would perhaps be no hindrance to their learning, and a great advantage to their health. My own sedentary course of life had long since thrown me into an ill habit, attended with many ailments, particularly a nervous colic, which rendered my life a burden, and the more so because my pains were exasperated by exercise. But since the use of tar-water, I find, though not a perfect recovery from my old and rooted illness, yet such a gradual return of health and ease, that I esteem my having taken this medicine the greatest of all temporal blessings, and am convinced that under Providence I owe my life to it.
HECTOR BERLIOZ
(1803-1869)
o the concert-goer the name Hector Berlioz calls up a series of vast and magnificent whirlwinds of vocal and orchestral sonority, the thoughts of scores that sound and look imposingly complex to the eyes and ears of both the educated and uneducated in the composer's art. We have a vision of close pages embodying the most unequivocal and drastic of musical "realism." The full audacity and mastery of a certain sort of genius are represented in his vast works. They bespeak, too, the combative musician and reformer. Berlioz took the kingdom of music by violence.
Hector Berlioz.
His chef d'oeuvres do not all say to us as much as he meant them to say, not as much as they all uttered twenty years ago. There is much clay as well as gold in them. But such tremendous products of his energy and intellect as the 'Requiem,' the 'Te Deum,' 'The Damnation of Faust,' his best descriptive symphonies such as the 'Romeo and Juliet,' are yet eloquent to the public and to the critical-minded. His best was so very good that his worst--weighed as a matter of principle or execution, regarded as music or "programme music"--can be excused.