Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

HENSELT 165
feel, a hopeless, an almost absurd task ; and yet I
shall try by just one or two imperfect metaphors to
give some idea of it, however faint and dim.
Henselt's touch suggested a shelling—a peeling off
of every particle of fibrous or barky rind ; the un-
veiling of a fine, inner, crystalline, and yet most
sensitive and most vitally elastic pith. With this, it
suggested a dipping deep, deep down into a sea of
tone, and bringing up thence a pearl of flawless
beauty and purity ; something, too, there was of the
exhalation of an essence—so concentrated, so intense,
that the whole being of the man seemed to have
passed for the moment into his finger-tips, from which
the sound seemed to well out, just as some sweet
yet pungent odour from the chalice of some rare
flower.
In justice to Professor Zschocher, I feel it but right
here to explain that the exclamation, ' He is a terrible
pedant !'—which irritated me and led me to imagine that
Professor Zschocher had more respect than love for
Henselt— ^must have been made in one of those passing
moments of ill-humour to which all of us are more
or less liable. After the Meister was gone he wrote
warmly and lovingly of him to the afflicted widow,
telling her that he should never cease to miss one who
had ever been a true and kind friend to him. And when
I visited him (Professor Zschocher) at his own house
in Leipzig, the following year, one of his first thoughts,
after we had exchanged a few words of greeting, was