musement it was Chopin he took up.

There is no more brilliant chapter than this Hungarian's on the dancing
of the Mazurka by the Poles. It is a companion to his equally
sensational description of the Polonaise. He gives a wild, whirling,
highly-colored narrative of the Mazurka, with a coda of extravagant
praise of the beauty and fascination of Polish women. "Angel through
love, demon through fantasy," as Balzac called her. In none of the
piano rhapsodies are there such striking passages to be met as in
Liszt's overwrought, cadenced prose, prose modelled after
Chateaubriand. Niema iak Polki--"nothing equals the Polish women" and
their "divine coquetries;" the Mazurka is their dance--it is the
feminine complement to the heroic and masculine Polonaise.

An English writer describes the dancing of the Mazurka in contemporary
Russia:

In the salons of St. Petersburg, for instance, the guests
actually dance; they do not merely shamble to and fro in a
crowd, crumpling their clothes and ruffling their tempers, and
call it a set of quadrilles. They have ample space for the
sweeping movements and complicated figures of all the orthodox
ball dances, and are generally gifted with sufficient plastic
grace to carry them out in style. They carefully cultivate
dances calling for a kind of grace which is almost beyond the
reach of art. The mazurka is one of the finest of these, and
it is quite a favorite at balls on the banks of the Neva. It
needs a good deal of room, one or more spurred officers, and
grace, grace and grace. The dash with which the partners rush
forward, the clinking and clattering of spurs as heel clashes
with heel in mid air, punctuating the staccato of the music,
the loud thud of boots striking the ground, followed by their
sibilant slide along the polished floor, then the swift
springs and sudden bounds, the whirling gyrations and dizzy
evolutions, the graceful genuflections and quick embraces, and
all the other intricate and maddening movements to the
accompaniment of one of Glinka's or Tschaikowsky's
masterpieces, awaken and mobilize all the antique heroism,
mediaeval chivalry and wild romance that lie dormant in the
depths of men's being. There is more genuine pleasure in being
the spectator of a soul thrilling dance like that than in
taking an active part in the lifeless make-believes performed
at society balls in many of the more Western countries of
E