In early years he worked sixteen, and sometimes eighteen, hours a day, and latterly never less than five; and the work was not desultory, but very direct. No man had a clearer notion of what he meant to do, and no man carried out his programme more rigidly. He was equal to Schubert in the rich flow of his musical ideas, but superior to him in arrangement and selection. He could be grave and playful; serious, and sometimes sublime, but seldom romantic. In him there is nothing artificial, nothing abnormal; his tenderness is all real, and his gaiety quite natural; nor is the balance of symmetry anywhere sacrificed to passion or to power. The abundance of his ideas never tempted him to neglect the fit elaboration of any. He applied himself without distraction to his thought until it became clear to himself. He would often compose, and then recompose on a given theme, until the perfect expression had been found. We remember, some years ago, one of the finest classical scholars at Cambridge, who was in the habit of making miserable work of his Greek-construing during class-time. Few of his pupils could understand what he was about; to the inexperienced freshman it sounded like the bungling of a schoolboy. The sentence was rendered over and over again, and at the close probably not a word retained its original position. Whilst the novices scribbled and scratched out, the older hands waited calmly for the last perfect form. The process

was fatiguing, but amply repaid the toil.

Poets

have been known to spend days over a line which

may afterwards have been destined to sparkle for

ever

"On the stretched forefinger of all time."

Like good construing or good poetry, good music demands the nost unremitting toil. No doubt the artist attains at length a certain direct and accurate power of expression. We know that many of Turner's pictures were dashed off without an after-touch. Whilst Macaulay's manuscripts are almost illegibly interlined and corrected, many of Walter Scott's novels are written almost without an erasure; but such facility combined with accuracy is, after all, only the work of a mind rendered both facile and accurate by long practice.

Haydn is valuable in the history of art, not only as a brilliant, but also as a complete artist. Perhaps, with the exception of Goethe and Wordsworth, there is no equally remarkable instance of a man who was 80 permitted to work out all that was in him. His life was a rounded whole. There was no broken light about it; it orbed slowly with a mild, unclouded lustre into a perfect star. Time was gentle with him, and Death was kind, for both waited upon his genius until all was won. Mozart was taken away at an age new and dazzling effects had not ceased to flash through his brain at the very moment when his harmonies began to have a prophetic ring of the nineteenth century, it was decreed that he should not see its dawn. Beethoven himself had but just entered

when

upon an unknown "sea whose margin seemed to fade for ever and for ever as he moved; but good old Haydn had come into port over a calm sea, and after a prosperous voyage. The laurel wreath was this time woven about silver locks; the gathered-in harvest was ripe and golden

N passing from the great gods of music to those other delightful tone-poets and singers whose works the world will not willingly let die, we could scarcely find any names more dear to the heart of the true musician than those of FRANZ SCHUBERT and FREDERIC CHOPIN.

Schubert, the prince of lyrists-Chopin, the most romantic of pianoforte writers, Schubert rich with an inexhaustible fancy-Chopin perfect with an exquisite finish, each reaching a supreme excellence in his own department, whilst one narrowly escaped being greatest in all-both occupied intensely with their own meditations, and admitting into them but little of the outer world-both too indifferent to the public taste to become immediately popular, but too remarkable to remain long unknown-both exhibiting in their lives and in their music striking resemblances and still more forcible contrasts-both now so widely admired and beloved in this country-so advanced and novel, that although Schubert has been in his grave for forty-two years and Chopin for twenty-two, yet to us they seem to have died but yesterday-these men partners in the common sufferings of genius, and together crowned with immortality in death, may well claim from us again and again the tribute of memory to their lives, and of homage to their inspiration.

In the parish of Lichtenthal, Vienna, the inhabitants are fond of pointing out a house commonly known by the sign of the "Red Crab," which, in addition to that intelligent and interesting symbol, bears the decoration of a small grey marble tablet, with the inscription-"Franz Schubert's Geburtshaus." On the right hand is a sculptured lyre, on the left, a wreath, with the date of the composer's birth, January 31, 1797.