composition,--by what
influences? It is an enigma: each listener may guess at the theme,
and each will associate it with the subject most in harmony with his
own taste.

In 1844 Robert Schumann, while looking over a heap of dusty
manuscripts at Vienna, found this wonderful symphony, until then
unknown. He was so much charmed with it that he sent it to
Mendelssohn at Leipzig. It was there produced at the Gewandhaus
concerts, won the admiration it deserved, and thence found its way
to all the orchestras of the world. The youthful composer had been
dead nearly twenty years when the discovery was made.

One of the best known of the dramatic German ballads is the Erl
King.

The Erl King is Death. He rides through the night. He comes to a
happy home, and carries away a child, galloping back to the
mysterious land whence he came.

In this ballad a father is represented as riding with a dying child
under his cloak. The Erl King pursues them.

Schubert gave the ballad its musical wings. I need not describe the
music. It is on your piano. Let it tell the story.

BEETHOVEN'S BOYHOOD AT BONN.

Literary men have often produced their best works late in life.
Longfellow cites some striking illustrations of this truth in
_Morituri Salutamus_:--

"It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than fourscore years.
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had but begun his Characters of Men.
Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,
At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;
Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust when eighty years were past."

Such examples of late working are seldom found in musical art. Men
seem to become musicians because of the inspiration born within
them. This impelling force is very early developed.

Handel, the greatest musical composer of his own or any age, was so
devoted to music in childhood that his father forbade his musical
studies. At the age of eleven he as greatly delighted and surprised
Frederick I. of Prussia by his inspirational playing; he was in
youth appointed to a conspicuous position of organist in Halle.

Haydn surprised his friends by his musical talents at his