n all of brilliant Paris there was no more charming and gifted circle
than that which gathered around the young Polish pianist and composer,
Chopin, then a recent arrival in the gay city. His peculiarly original
genius, his weird and poetic style of playing, which transported his
hearers into a mystic fairy-land of sunlight and shadow, his strangely
delicate beauty, the alternating reticence and enthusiasm of his
manners, made him the idol of the clever men and women, who courted the
society of the shy and sensitive musician; for to them he was a fresh
revelation. Dr. Franz Liszt gives the world some charming pictures of
this art-coterie, which was wont often to assemble at Chopin's rooms in
the Chaussee d'Antin.

His room, taken by surprise, is all in darkness except the luminous ring
thrown off by the candles on the piano, and the flashes flickering from
the fireplace. The guests gather around informally as the piano sighs,
moans, murmurs, or dreams under the fingers of the player. Hein-rich
Heine, the most poetic of humorists, leans on the instrument, and asks,
as he listens to the music and watches the firelight, "if the roses
always glowed with a flame so triumphant? if the trees at moonlight sang
always so harmoniously?" Meyerbeer, one of the musical giants, sits near
at hand lost in reverie; for he forgets his own great harmonies, forged
with hammer of Cyclops, listening to the dreamy passion and poetry woven
into such quaint fabrics of sound.

Adolphe Nourrit, passionate and ascetic, with the spirit of some
mediaeval monastic painter, an enthusiastic servant of art in its
purest, severest form, a combination of poet and anchorite, is also
there; for he loves the gentle musician, who seems to be a visitor from
the world of spirits. Eugene Delacroix, one of the greatest of modern
painters, his keen eyes half closed in meditation, absorbs the vague
mystery of color which imagination translates from the harmony,
and attains new insight and inspiration through the bright links of
suggestion by which one art lends itself to another. The two great
Polish poets, Nierncewicz and Mickiewicz (the latter the Dante of the
Slavic race), exiles from their unhappy land, feed their sombre sorrow,
and find in the wild, Oriental rhythms of the player only melancholy
memories of the past. Perhaps Victor Hugo, Balzac, Lamartine, or the
aged Chateaubriand, also drop in by-and-by, to recognize, in the music,
echoes of the daring roma