With your mind, its pursuits, studies, and acquirements, the rich pages now on my table seem to have given me a perfect acquaintance. Apprehensive, from the style of your address to me, that you estimate mine too highly, I feel disposed to be, what, I trust, I have not often been, an absolute egotist; for I had rather voluntarily reveal to you the scantiness of my stores, than that time should betray them.

[...]

Without time to have attained any degree of skill in the practical part of music, which I never attempted till I had passed my twentieth year, yet my taste for it has been cultivated and refined, by listening to frequent conversations on the subject, not from arrogant and comparatively ignorant dilettantis, but from ingenious professors; -- and by living in the almost daily habit of hearing vocal music, in those perfectly fine tones, and with that elegance, pathos, energy, and varied powers, which marries it to poetry.