Such a period of relaxation was that which intervened between Beethoven and Brahms. The romanticists, headed by Schumann, seized upon the possibilities of poignant expression that they were quick to recognize in their heritage from Beethoven, and developed an extraordinarily mobile and eloquent instrument for voicing personal emotion. At the same time they inevitably lost the perfect control of form, the transparent lucidity of structure, that had characterized Beethoven. In some respects more moving, they were on the whole less intelligible. They were enriching their art, and must leave the perfect subordination of the new material to their successors. It is most interesting to trace the analogy between this development of musical expression and the growth of emotional life in the individual, and to observe how in both the period of experience, in which emotion is felt in all its immediate stress, inhibiting all else and being therefore conceived in no relations, but merely as a single and ultimate fact, is followed by the period of meditation and self-inspection, when the whole emotional life is grouped into order, and the man learns to see the significance and the spiritual value of his feelings. With the romanticists music necessarily became more and more the medium of personal passion, less and less the revealer of universal order. Browning, himself a romanticist through and through, has summed up the spirit of romanticism in a single stanza of his «Old Pictures in Florence»: «On which I conclude, that the early painters, To cries of 'Greek art and what more wish you?' Replied, 'To become now self-acquainters, And paint man, man, whatever the issue! Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters: To bring the invisible full into play! Let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?'»