I have talked enough about important and serious subjects. Now let's go to the temple of fine arts that delight and beautify our earthly, laborious life. Politics and the sciences will take their usual course, but the arts transcend the mundane. It is possible to educate a civil servant, it is possible to teach a recruit proper conduct, it is possible to lacquer a fool with knowledge; but poets, artists, and musicians are born fortuitously like lilies of the field, like nightingales and birds of paradise! And when the poetry of Schiller, Lamartine, and Pushkin ceases to amaze me; and when I no longer stop with delight in front of a painting by Dominikin, in front of The Last Day of Pompeii; when I listen indifferently to melodies evoked from oblivion by Mozart and Rossini—then don't waste time and order the cards with a black rim from the print shop, of standard form: “The so and so, inform with great sadness, etc.” — Music—Italian music—has a different, higher meaning for me at present; it evokes a sweet memory in my soul of my dear one who only recently shared this delight with me, and, leaving this world for the better one, in the last minutes of his earthly life, nourished on this unearthly harmony … … …

I left Petersburg in the most sorrowful frame of mind. Confined on the steamer and suffering from seasickness, I found no pleasure in anything, could not clear my gloomy thoughts. Boisterous, pleasant, good old Hamburg somewhat distracted me. I even ventured to go to the theatre, to listen to music: in Petersburg I had not been to the theatre since the first performance of A Life for the Tsar. To my good fortune, as I have already mentioned, they were performing Mozart's Don Juan, in my opinion and taste, the most wonderful among all the operas I know, and they performed it very well. Amazing sounds transported me into the world above the stars. I will elaborate on this expression. Have you ever noticed the correlation of earthly music with the mysteries of the universe? Have you not stopped to ponder the expression: music of the celestial spheres?