It was the poems of Goethe that inspired Schubert with some of his most beautiful and sublime conceptions. He set sixty-seven of them to music, and of the whole number there is perhaps not one in which we do not feel that the song of the greatest of German poets has been invested with a higher spiritual life by the music of the most poetical composer the world has seen. How full of the most delicate fragrance of poetry are the lines "Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh," etc.! but when one has once associated them with Schubert's music, one feels that to break this association (were it possible) and return to the verses pure and simple would be a far greater descent than from poetry to prose. In spite of the startling originality already evinced in the Erl King, we find a decided conservatism alleged for some of Schubert's musical judgments at this youthful period. It was a time when Beethoven was still by many people regarded with suspicion as a reckless innovator upon the orthodox forms and methods. Since the middle of the century, indeed, one has often heard some of the magnificent works of Beethoven's third period, including his four latest piano sonatas and some of his quartets, set down as eccentric vagaries instead of being comprehended in their true light as the ripe fruits of his most consummate artistic maturity. At the beginning of the century more or less opposition was excited even by the earlier works of Beethoven which transgressed the limits of expression within which Haydn and Mozart had been confined. Schubert was at that time a friend and to some extent a pupil of the Venetian composer, Antonio Salieri, conductor of the choir in the Emperor's chapel. Salieri gave Schubert more or less instruction in thorough-bass and used to correct and criticise his compositions. He advised him not to waste his time over ballads and lyrics by Goethe and Schiller, but to set to music by preference the old and formal Italian stanzas. Another piece of advice, as applied to the inexhaustible Schubert, is deliciously grotesque; Salieri thought he had better "husband his resources of melody." There is a point of view, as we shall presently see, from which a grain of sound sense can be descried in such counsel; but these incidents sufficiently indicate Salieri's conservatism of temperament. He wrote about forty operas, a dozen oratorios and cantatas, and a quantity of miscellaneous vocal and and instrumental works, not without merit, all of which have virtually sunk into oblivion. In June 1816 there was a jubilee festival to celebrate Salieri's residence of fifty years in Vienna, and many compositions of his pupils, written especially for the occasion, were produced. The music ended with a chorus from Salieri's oratorio, "Christ in Hades," in which the composer had caught some of his inspiration from Gluck. After returning from the performance, Schubert wrote that same evening in his diary as follows:--"It must be pleasant and invigorating to the artist to