Schumann's latter days were very sorrowful, for he was afflicted with a great mental distress, caused, we are told by one of his biographers, by ossification of the brain. He was haunted by delusions--amongst others, by the constant hearing of a single musical note. "On one occasion he was under the impression that Schubert and Mendelssohn had visited him, and had given him a musical theme, which he wrote down, and upon which he set himself to write variations." He suffered from attacks of acute melancholy, and at length, during one of them, threw himself into the Rhine, but was, fortunately, rescued. At length it became necessary to confine him in a private asylum, where he was visited by his friends when his condition permitted it. He died on July 29, 1856, in presence of his wife, through whose exertions, in great part, we, in England, have become acquainted with his pianoforte works. [Decoration] _CHOPIN._ I. Never has Paris, the Mecca of European art, genius, and culture, presented a more brilliant social spectacle than it did in 1832. Hitherward came pilgrims from all countries, poets, painters, and musicians, anxious to breathe the inspiring air of the French capital, where society laid its warmest homage at the feet of the artist. Here came, too, in dazzling crowds, the rich nobles and the beautiful women of Europe to find the pleasure, the freedom, the joyous unrestraint, with which Paris offers its banquet of sensuous and intellectual delights to the hungry epicure. Then as now the queen of the art-world, Paris absorbed and assimilated to herself the most brilliant influences in civilisation. In all of brilliant Paris there was no more charming and gifted circle than that which gathered around the young Polish pianist and composer, Chopin, then a recent arrival in the gay city. His peculiarly original genius, his weird and poetic style of playing, which transported his hearers into a mystic fairy-land of sunlight and shadow, his strangely delicate beauty, the alternating reticence and enthusiasm of his manners, made him the idol of the clever men and women, who courted the society of the shy and sensitive musician; for to them he was a fresh revelation. Dr. Franz Liszt gives the world some charming pictures of this art-coterie, which was wont often to assemble at Chopin's rooms in the Chaussée d'Antin.