dern effects; his string
quartettes, and other chamber music, worthy to be ranked with those of
any other master; and his symphonies exquisitely beautiful in their
ideas, orchestral coloring and the entire atmosphere which they
carry--his habitual attitude was that of the writer of songs. Some of
these are of remarkable length and range. One of them extends to
sixty-six pages of manuscript. Another occupies forty-five pages of
close print. A work of this kind is a cantata, and not merely a song.
Many of the others are six or eight pages long, and in all the music
freely and spontaneously follows the poem, with a delicate
correspondence between the poetic idea and the melody, with its
harmony and treatment, such as we look for in vain in any other
writer, unless it be Schumann, who, however, did not possess
Schubert's instinct of the vocally suitable. For with all the range
which these songs cover, their vocal quality is as noticeable as that
of Italian cantilenas.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE STORY OF THE PIANOFORTE.

The popular instrument of the nineteenth century has been the
pianoforte, the result of an evolution having its beginning more than
six centuries back. It is impossible in the present state of knowledge
to trace all the steps through which this remarkable instrument has
reached its present form. In the Assyrian sculptures discovered by
Layard, there are instruments apparently composed of metal rods or
plates, touched by hammers, upon the same general principle as the toy
instrument with glass plates, or the xylophone composed of wooden rods
resting upon bands of straw. In these the use of the hammer for
producing the tone is obvious. In the Middle Ages there was an
instrument called the psaltery, apparently some sort of a four-sided
harp strung with metal strings. The evidence upon this point is rather
indistinct. Still later there is the Arab santir (p. 114). This was a
trapeze-shaped instrument, composed of a solid frame, sounding board
and metal wires struck with hammers. This instrument still exists in
Germany under the name of _Hackbrett_, or the dulcimer. As now made,
each string consists of three wires tuned in unison. It is played by
means of leather hammers held in the hand. The difficulty of adapting
this instrument to the keyboard consisted in the fact that if the
hammers were connected with the keys, they would be under the strings
instead of above them, and this difficul