Cross seas the ship by thy good guidance goes;
Fields arable, rich gardens, sacred grove,
Town, temple, feel the influence of thy love;
Thy sacred power the mind immortal knows,
Nor can thy empire, universal, end
Till Nature’s forces all in sweet subjection bend.
A REPLY TO DWIGHT’S ARTICLE ON MOZART’S DON GIOVANNI.
This is the title of a long and prominent article in Graham’s February number: the writer is but a wordy plagiarist. He has received many rebukes already for his cool appropriation of the ideas of others, but Aristabulus Bragg fashion, he still goes on, in the calmest, most approved style, perfectly unblushing. A year or eighteen months ago an article of his in Sartain’s Magazine was pointed out to us as containing some clever thoughts on a very original idea, “the Musical Trinity.” Oh, we exclaimed, this is not original, the whole idea is stolen from the German; then we turned to Goethe’s correspondence with a child, Bettina von Arnheim, and found several passages on the same subject in conversations with Beethoven and Schlosser. Some time after we read in Saroni’s Musical Times that the editor had also detected the plagiarism in this article, and pointed out another author, book and page; saying with great good-nature that he would not have noticed it, had Mr. Dwight only written his article as clearly and concisely as the original; “but to rob an author first and then murder him,” says the editor, “is more than we can bear.” The author alluded to by Mr. Saroni, is the German Marx, and he tells us that the fourth paragraph in Sartain’s article is an almost literal translation of a paragraph in Marx’s “Komposition-shlere,” second edition, p. 24.
We have waded through this last article of Mr. Dwight’s on Don Giovanni, partly from curiosity, partly for amusement. We wanted to see the extent to which he would go: and then it amused us to detect the little pilfered thoughts, trigged out in the Boston transcendental clothing until their parents would have scarcely recognized them.