"Where you rivalled Handel!" said Haydn enthusiastically. "Handel, with all his greatness, had no versatility. Your sacred music, Porpora, will live when your theatrical compositions have ceased to enjoy unrivalled popularity."
"My sacred compositions may survive and carry my name to posterity; for taste in such things is less mutable than in the opera. You see now, dear Haydn, for what I have lived and labored. I was once renowned and wealthy. What did prosperity bring me? Envy, discontent, rivalship, disappointment! Would you know to what period I can look back with self-approbation, with thankfulness? To the toil of early years; to the struggle after an ideal of greatness, goodness, and beauty; to the self-forgetfulness that saw only the glorious goal far, far before me; to the undismayed resolve that sought only its attainment. Or to a time still later, when the visions of manhood's impure and selfish ambition had faded away, when the soul had shaken off some of her fetters, and roused herself to a perception of the eternal, the perfect, the divine; when I became conscious of the delusive vanity of earthly hopes and earthly excellence, but at the same time awakened to the revelation of that which cannot die!
"You see me now, seventy-three years old, and too poor to command even a shelter for the few days that yet remain to me in this world. I have lost the splendid fame I once possessed; I have lost the riches that were mine; I have lost the power to win even a competence by my own labors; but I have not lost my passion for our glorious music, nor enjoyment of the reward she bestows on her votaries; nor my confidence in Heaven. And you, at twenty-seven, you—more greatly endowed, to whom the world is open—you despair! Are you worthy to succeed, O man of little faith?"
"My friend, my benefactor!" cried the young artist, clasping his hand with deep emotion.
"Cast away your bonds; cut and rend, if your very flesh is torn in the effort; and the ground once spurned, you are free. What have you been doing?" And he turned over rapidly the musical notes that lay on the table. "Here, what is this—a symphony? Play it for me, if you please."
So saying, with a gentle force he led his young friend to the piano, and Haydn played from the piece he had nearly completed.
"This is excellent, admirable!" cried Porpora, when he rose from the instrument. "When can you finish this? for I must have it at once."
"To-morrow, if you like," answered the composer more cheerfully.
"To-morrow then; and you must work to-night. I will go and order you a physician; he will come to-morrow morning—how madly your pulse throbs!—and when your work is done, you may rest. Adieu for the present." And pressing his young friend's hands, the eccentric but benevolent old man departed, leaving Haydn full of new thoughts, his bosom fired with zeal to struggle against adverse fortune. In such moods does the spiritual champion wrestle with the powers of the abyss, and mightily prevail.
When Haydn, late that night, threw himself on his bed, weary, ill, and exhausted, his frame racked with the pains of fever, he had accomplished the first of an order of works destined to endear his name to all succeeding time.