It seems strange at first sight that the mazurkas, these exquisite love poems, should be so much less popular than the waltzes, for they are quite as melodious and much easier--although here, as elsewhere, Chopin often introduces a few very difficult bars in an otherwise easy composition, as if to keep away bunglers. Perhaps the cause of their comparative neglect is, that they are so thoroughly Polish in spirit; unless they are played with an exotic _rubato_, their fragrance vanishes. There is more local color in the mazurkas than in any of his other works. The Mazurs are musically a highly gifted nation, and Chopin was impressed early in life with the quaint originality of their melodies. No doubt some of his mazurkas are merely artistic settings of these old love songs, but they are the settings of an inspired jeweller. If we can judge by the number of pieces of each class that he wrote, the mazurka was Chopin's favorite form. Even on his death-bed he wrote one. It was his last effort, and he was too weak to try it over on the piano. It is of heart-rending sadness, and exquisite pathos. Perhaps it was a patriotic rather than an aesthetic feeling which led him thus to favor the mazurka. His love for his country was exceeded only by his devotion to his art. "Oh, how sad it must be to die in a foreign country," he wrote to a friend in 1830; and when, soon afterward, he left home he took along a handful of Polish soil which he kept for nineteen years. Shortly before his death he expressed a wish that it should be strewn in his coffin--a wish which was fulfilled; so that his body rested on Polish soil even in Paris. A countless number of exquisite melodic rhythmic and harmonic details in the mazurkas might be dwelt upon in this place, but I will only call attention to the inexhaustible variety of ideas which makes each of them so unique, notwithstanding their strong family likeness. They are like fantastic orchids, or like the countless varieties of humming birds, those "winged poems of the air," of which no two are alike while all resemble each other.