of him, "He has done enough, and praised be he who, like Schubert, has striven and accomplished." Nevertheless it was equally true that he was cut off while his powers were rapidly expanding, and at a moment when even greater achievement, though difficult to imagine, would have been no more than a logical consequence of what had gone before. [Illustration: SCHUBERT'S TOMB IN VIENNA.--From a photograph. Erected to his memory by the Vienna Manner Gesangs-Verein (Male Chorus).] Schubert's personal appearance was not attractive. He was short and round-shouldered, and in his homely face there was nothing to betray the sacred fire within him save the brightness of the eyes. His character was almost without a flaw. Simplicity, modesty, kindness, truthfulness, and fidelity were his marked attributes. He was utterly free from envy or malice, and not a trace of selfishness appears in anything he ever said or did. His life was devoted, with entire disinterestedness, to the pursuit of the noblest aims of art. * * * * * Concerning his position in the history of music there is but little question, and the subject admits of a brief statement. The man who died in his thirty-second year, leaving behind him at least eleven hundred and thirty-one _such_ compositions, must surely be called the most prolific of composers, even after allowing for the fact that more than six hundred of these works were songs, and therefore brief. We may safely say, too, that for creative spontaneity such a man can never have been surpassed, perhaps scarcely ever have been equalled. This spontaneous genius found its first and most characteristic expression in vocal song, and it is commonly if not universally agreed that Schubert was the greatest composer of songs that ever lived. In this department of music he marks an era. In him the German Lied reached a plane of development to which it had not attained before him. The German Lied (i.e. Lay) was originally a Volkslied (i.e. Folk's-lay) or popular melody. The merit of popular melody lies largely in its spontaneity. In German popular melody, from the oldest times, the merit of beauty has been added to that of spontaneity, inasmuch as the Germans, like the Slavs, are naturally musical in a sense in which English-speaking people are not. No German-speaking people would tolerate for a national air such a tune as Yankee Doodle. In the plainest German folk-song may be found spontaneous simplicity without vulgarity. Hence the Volkslied has been available as a source of melodic suggestiveness to German composers. It is one such chief source, the Gregorian chant being the other. To the presence of this folk-song element we may largely ascribe the far higher poetic quality of German classical music as compared with the more prosaic musical declamation of the modern French and Italians.