life for the
next eighteen years: In Paris, 27 Boulevard Poisonniere, to 5 and 38
Chaussee d'Antin, to Aix-la-Chapelle, Carlsbad, Leipzig, Heidelberg,
Marienbad, and London, to Majorca, to 5 Rue Tronchet, 16 Rue Pigalle,
and 9 Square d'Orleans, to England and Scotland, to 9 Square d'Orleans
once more, Rue Chaillot and 12 Place Vendeme, and then--Pere la Chaise,
the last resting-place. It may be seen that Chopin was a restless,
though not roving nature. In later years his inability to remain
settled in one place bore a pathological impress,--consumptives are
often so.

The Paris of 1831, the Paris of arts and letters, was one of the most
delightful cities in the world for the culture-loving. The molten tide
of passion and decorative extravagance that swept over intellectual
Europe three score years and ten ago, bore on its foaming crest Victor
Hugo, prince of romanticists. Near by was Henri Heine,--he left
Heinrich across the Rhine,--Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and
gall, who sneered and wept in the same couplet. The star of classicism
had seemingly set. In the rich conflict of genius were Gautier,
Schumann, and the rest. All was romance, fantasy, and passion, and the
young men heard the moon sing silvery--you remember De Musset!--and the
leaves rustle rhythms to the heart-beats of lovers. "Away with the
gray-beards," cried he of the scarlet waistcoat, and all France
applauded "Ernani." Pity it was that the romantic infant had to die of
intellectual anaemia, leaving as a legacy the memories and work of one
of the most marvellous groupings of genius since the Athens of
Pericles. The revolution of 1848 called from the mud the sewermen.
Flaubert, his face to the past, gazed sorrowfully at Carthage and wrote
an epic of the French bourgeois. Zola and his crowd delved into a moral
morass, and the world grew weary of them. And then the faint, fading
flowers of romanticism were put into albums where their purple
harmonies and subtle sayings are pressed into sweet twilight
forgetfulness. Berlioz, mad Hector of the flaming locks, whose
orchestral ozone vivified the scores of Wagnerand Liszt, began to sound
garishly empty, brilliantly superficial; "the colossal nightingale" is
difficult to classify even to-day. A romantic by temperament he
unquestionably was. But then his music, all color, nuance, and
brilliancy, was not genuinely romantic in its themes. Compare him with
Schumann, and the genuine romanticist tops the virtuos