In 1825 the two friends made a little concert tour together in the Salzburg country and Upper Austria. By that time the new songs were becoming famous, though one serious obstacle to the wide diffusion of their popularity was the want of singers able to grapple with their technical difficulties and to express their poetical sentiment in an artistic manner. Operatic quips and cranks and wanton flourishes would by no means answer the purpose. Old conventional methods were of no use. A passage from Vogl's diary is worth quoting in this connection for the glimpse it gives us of his fine artistic intelligence:--"Nothing shows so plainly the want of a good school of singing as Schubert's songs. Otherwise, what an enormous and universal effect must have been produced throughout the world, wherever the German language is understood, by these truly divine inspirations, these utterances of a musical _clairvoyance!_ How many would have comprehended, probably for the first time, the meaning of such expressions as 'speech and poetry in music,' 'words in harmony,' 'ideas clothed in music,' etc., and would have learned that the finest poems of our greatest poets may be enhanced and even transcended when translated into musical language! Numberless examples may be named, but I will mention only the Erl King, Gretchen am Spinnrade, Schwager Kronos, the Mignon and Harper's songs, Schiller's Sehnsucht, Der Pilgrim, and Die Bürgschaft." [Illustration: Bauernfeld. Schubert. Kupelwieser. Beethoven. Betty Fröhlich. Mayrhofer. Schwind. Spaun. Vogl. Grillparzer. Josephine Fröhlich. Kathi Fröhlich. SCHUBERT AND HIS FRIENDS. _Reproduced from photograph of painting which does not represent any historical scene, as Beethoven and Schubert never met amid such surroundings. This grouping of Schubert's friends is made by poetical license_.]