I have listened to the playing--no, the thrumming and stamping--of many of these champions of the modern style of beauty; and I have come to the conclusion, according to my way of reasoning, that it ought to be called a higher,--quite different, inverted beauty,--a deformed beauty, repugnant to the sensibilities of all mankind.

But our gifted "age of the future" protests against such cold conservatism.

The period of piano fury which I have lived to see, and which I have just described, was the introduction to this new essay, only a feeble attempt, and a preliminary to this piano future.

Should this senseless raging and storming upon the piano, where not one idea can be intelligently expressed in a half-hour, this abhorrent and rude treatment of a grand concert piano, combined with frightful misuse of both pedals, which puts the hearer into agonies of horror and spasms of terror, ever be regarded as any thing but a return to barbarism, devoid of feeling and reason?
This is to be called music! music of the future! the beauty of the future style! Truly, for this style of music, the ears must be differently constructed, the feelings must be differently constituted, and a different nervous system must be created! For this again we shall need surgeons, who lie in wait in the background with the throat improvers.

What a new and grand field of operations lies open to them! Our age produces monsters, who are insensible to the plainest truths, and who fill humanity with horror.