in
the extract previously quoted, justly says: "He was molded by the
deep poetic spirit of Beethoven, with whom form only had value as it
expressed truthfully and beautifully symmetry of conception."

The forms of Chopin's compositions grew out of the keyboard of the
piano, and their _genre_ is so peculiar that it is nearly impracticable
to transpose them for any other instrument. Some of the noted
contemporary violinists have attempted to transpose a few of the
Nocturnes and Etudes, but without success. Both Schumann and Liszt
succeeded in adapting Paganini's most complex and difficult violin works
for the piano-forte, but the compositions of Chopin are so essentially
born to and of the one instrument that they can not be well suited to
any other. The cast of the melody, the matchless beauty and swing of the
rhythm, his ingenious treatment of harmony, and the chromatic changes
and climaxes through which the motives are developed, make up a new
chapter in the history of the piano-forte.

Liszt, in his life of Chopin, says of him: "His character was indeed
not easily understood. A thousand subtile shades, mingling, crossing,
contradicting, and disguising each other, rendered it almost
undecipherable at first view; kind, courteous, affable, and almost
of joyous manners, he would not suffer the secret convulsions which
agitated him to be ever suspected. His works, concertos, waltzes,
sonatas, ballades, polonaises, mazurkas, nocturnes, scherzi, all reflect
a similar enigma in a most poetical and romantic form."

Chopin's moral nature was not cast in an heroic mold, and he lacked the
robust intellectual marrow which is essential to the highest forms of
genius in art as well as in literature and affairs, though it is not
safe to believe that he was, as painted by George Sand and Liszt, a
feeble youth, continually living at death's door in an atmosphere of
moonshine and sentimentality. But there can be no question that the
whole bent of Chopin's temperament and genius was melancholy, romantic,
and poetic, and that frequently he gives us mere musical moods and
reveries, instead of well-defined and well-developed ideas. His music
perhaps loses nothing, for, if it misses something of the clear,
inspiring, vigorous quality of other great composers, it has a subtile,
dreamy, suggestive beauty all its own.

The personal life of Chopin was singularly interesting. His long and
intimate connection with George Sand; the circumstanc