I think it was during the season of 1853 that I first heard Arabella Goddard, who came before the public as a slight, quiet-looking girl of fifteen, with works at her fingers' ends that had —at least, so it was said at the time — never theretofore been performed in a London concert room... I heard her play the Posthumous Sonata without book. Her tempi and execution were as a rule faultless, even then — too faultless, perhaps; for over-conscientious attention to the countless details of such colossal compositions as those above referred to, left her no spare intellectual force wherewith to investigate the Master's true meaning.