I Shall Hear In Heaven.

You Ask Me Where I Get My Ideas. That I Cannot Tell You With Certainty. They Come Unsummoned, Directly, Indirectly - I Could Seize Them With My Hands - Out In The Open Air, In The Woods, While Walking, In The Silence Of The Nights, At Dawn, Excited By Moods Which Are Translated By The Poet Into Words, By Me Into Tones That Sound And Roar And Storm About Me Till I Have Set Them Down In Notes.

Yet It Was Impossible For Me To Say To People, 'speak Louder, Shout, For I Am Deaf.' Ah, How Could I Possibly Admit An Infirmity In The One Sense Which Ought To Be More Perfect In Me Than Others, A Sense Which I Once Possessed In The Highest Perfection, A Perfection Such As Few In My Profession Enjoy Or Ever Have Enjoyed.

Everything Should Be At Once Surprising And Inevitable.

Such Incidents Brought Me To The Verge Of Despair, But Little More And I Would Have Put An End To My Life - Only Art It Was That Withheld Me, - Ah, It Seemed Impossible To Leave The World Until I Had Produced All That I Had Felt Called Upon To Produce.

Music Is The Electric Soil In Which The Spirit Thinks, Lives And Invents. All That's Electrical Stimulates The Mind To Flowing Surging Musical Creation. I Am Electrical By Nature.