The year 1824 was marked chiefly by piano compositions,--two sonatas and an overture for four hands, besides a vast quantity of dance music, and the "Divertissement à l'hongroise," suggested by an air hummed by the kitchen maid at the Esterhazys' country house, where Schubert spent the summer to recruit his health. There was also a string quartet, and the celebrated octet for strings and wood which is now so familiar. This activity in the sonata form seems to have culminated next year in the ninth symphony, which was almost surely finished about August, 1825, but which has quite disappeared from sight. There were three piano sonatas, besides the fragment of a fourth. Of these the sonata in A minor, Op. 42, must probably be pronounced the greatest of Schubert's works for the piano, showing along with its wealth of inventiveness a mastery of form almost as complete as the best of the songs. Among the grand songs of this year must be mentioned "Die junge Nonne," and the group of seven to Scott's "Lady of the Lake," of which the most famous is the "Ave Maria." [Illustration: SCHUBERT'S MONUMENT IN VIENNA.--From a photograph.] Our composer's progress toward perfect achievement in instrumental music is marked in 1826 by the two string quartets in G and D minor. The latter is not only Schubert's greatest work in chamber music, but is hardly surpassed by the work of any other composer in this department. At the same time came the piano sonata in G, Op. 78, of remarkable breadth and grandeur. The Shakespeare songs already mentioned belong to this year. Among the works of 1827 the most memorable was the second grand cycle of songs to words by Wilhelm Müller,--the immortal "Winterreise." These jewels of lyric art, what lover of music will fail to know them, so long as art endures? But a more sombre tone prevails in them than the songster had sustained at such length before. The note of unsatisfied longing, of the strange contrast between the glow of aspiration and the chill reality, is most decisively struck in "Frühlingstraum." In the last of the cycle, the pathetic "Leiermann," the sadness is only heightened by the indescribably delicate and playful humor which hovers about the phrases. To us it may seem as if these lyrics contained a premonition of the end that was not far off; but probably Schubert did not suspect it. His grandest outburst of creative power was yet to come; he was studying his art more earnestly than ever, and in the true spirit of artist or scholar, as if all eternity lay before him, though the dread summons might come to-morrow; in the sweet words of the old monkish distich:-- "Disce ut semper victurus, Vive ut eras moriturus."