This need for expression, felt by every human creature, appears in men of profound and intense interior life as a creative impulse; it is so not only with artists and poets, but in many cases with scholars, philosophers, and scientific discoverers; the relief is found in giving objective form to the thoughts that come welling up from the depths of the spirit. But it is in art that creative expression most becomes in itself an overmastering end, and especially in the two arts that give swiftest and readiest outlet to emotion, in poetry and in music. Hence one of the noblest functions of art, to be the consoler of the troubled soul, to sink its individual sorrows in the contemplation of eternal beauty, to bring weary and doubting humanity into restful communion with the divine source of all its yearnings, in the faith that they have not been given us for naught. If there ever was a soul thus sustained and comforted, it was the pure and earnest soul of Schubert; the stream of song that flowed from him was like the ecstatic but soothing and strengthening prayer of the mediæval saint. One can see that this shy and sensitive young man, somewhat inclined withal to self-depreciation, would not be quick to avow a love which social conditions at any rate scarcely favored. He was son of a peasant, Caroline Esterhazy was daughter of a count. Such a passion was likely to seek relief in strains of music, as Dante's worship of Beatrice found expression in verse. As the thought of Beatrice was in all that Dante wrote, so the story of Schubert's momentary confession to Caroline that all that he had sung was dedicated to her is in nowise improbable in itself. There is a circumstance which invests it with a considerable degree of probability. Shortly after Schubert's death his beautiful Fantasia in F minor, Op. 103, was published with the inscription, "Dedicated to the Countess Caroline Esterhazy by Franz Schubert," and Sir George Grove rightly infers that the publishers would hardly have ventured upon such a step "unless the manuscript--probably handed to them before his death--had been so inscribed by himself." This is perhaps all that is known concerning the question as to Schubert's love.