Music alone occupies me, of which someone has said 'that it will be the religion of the future,' the purest manifestation of the ideal.

Everything that is beautiful delights me, and I believe in it as a work of God.

'I believe in God and in Beethoven,' as his pupil said--and besides, how much religion the grandeur of music contains! Do you know the last quartet that Beethoven wrote?
He felt he was dying, and he wrote on the edge of the score this terrible question: 'Must it be ?' and lower down he added, 'Yes, it must be, it must be.' It was necessary to die, even for such a genius to leave life, while he still carried in his mind such glorious things, to pay the tribute of human renovation; and then he wrote that lament, that farewell to life, whose greatness cannot be equalled by any song, or by any words of religion." The musician sat down to the harmonium, and for a long while played that last lament of the genius, his sorrowful complaint on crossing the threshold, not despairing and trembling through fear of the unknown, but with a brave melancholy, sinking into the eternal shadow, confident that nothing could obscure his genius.
These evenings of artistic communion in that corner of the sleepy Cathedral drew the two men together with an ever increasing affection.
The musician talked, turning over his scores, or playing his harmonium; the revolutionist listened silently, only interrupting his friend by his painful cough.

They were evenings of sweet sadness that these two men spent together, one dreaming of leaving the stone prison of the Cathedral to see the world, the other returning from life wounded and breathless, content with the obscure repose of the beautiful church, and guarding with prudent silence the secret of his past.

Art shone for them like the rays of the sun in the grey and monotonous atmosphere of the Cathedral.
When they met in the early mornings in the cloister the conversation between the two friends generally ran on the same lines.
"This evening, eh ?" the Chapel-master would say mysteriously.