or circuit of themes its forms exemplified, the “cyclical-form period.” It culminated in the early years of the nineteenth century, in the grand works of Beethoven’s maturity. After Beethoven, music began to ramify in so many directions that it is impossible to classify its phases in a hard-and-fast series. It had its romanticists, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, who uttered with freer passion and poetry the emotional and spiritual meanings already heard in Beethoven. It had its realists, notably Berlioz and Liszt, who, attempting to divert it into the realm of pictorial delineation and description, have been followed by all the horde of contemporary writers of programme-music. It had its nationalists, men like Glinka, Smetana, and in our own day, Grieg and Dvořák, who sought to impress upon its speech a local accent. Above all, it had one great master, Brahms, who, assimilating the polyphony of Bach, the architectonic structure of Beethoven, and the romantic ardor of Schumann, added to them all his own austere beauty and profound feeling. But we are too near these later masters to get any general, justly-proportioned view of them. It is on the horizon only that mountains cease to be solitary peaks, and become ranges, the trend and disposition of which can be accurately plotted on the maps. The general tendency of musical evolution, down to Beethoven so clearly traceable, so obviously continuous, becomes after him bafflingly complex. Fortunately, this complexity need not embarrass our present undertaking. We have seen how, in the gradual and laborious, but incessant and inevitable growth of musical art, period succeeded period as the artistic faculty of man constantly discerned new possibilities of beauty, sensuous, expressive, and æsthetic, in the tonal material with which it dealt. We have seen how this evolution tended always from the indefinite, incoherent, and homogeneous toward the definite, coherent, and heterogeneous; and how it tended to embody ever higher and higher values, beginning with the mere sense-stimulations of savages and leading up to the highly complex and intellectual sound-fabric of Beethoven, in which the sensuous and emotional values are held ever subordinate to the æsthetic. We have examined, briefly and summarily, the special characteristics of the successive periods into which the great evolution has been divided by those critical points which the nature of its material determined. With the general view of musical history thus gained held clearly in mind, we may now profitably pass to that more detailed study of the great period of Beethoven, the golden age of pure music, which is the especial task before us.