He lives entirely in music. From the far land of invention float the melodies, eternally varying, giving colour to the harmonies, and pouring themselves out to their very last note. The ear cannot have enough of them, and, full of the holiest delight, pursues them to the end of their heavenly course. In Paradise there is no time; and these melodies are a prologue to eternity. Schubert died at thirty-one. His D minor quartet, one of the loveliest compositions ever written, leads us to imagine that he would have been the greatest musician of the century. But he has left us only the works of his youth--a youth of intellectual intimateness and smiling sunshine. In delicacy of musical feeling we put no one above him. He stands before us in the small band of original and delicate minds, whose secret can make the life of higher emotions happy. Let not him who has not delicate fingers touch Schubert. To play him means to have a dainty touch. The keyboard appears unmaterialised: only so much of the mechanism seems to remain as is necessary to render living the conception of this beauty. In peaceful hours we enjoy him most, and confess that there is no tone-poet whom we love so deeply from the heart as Schubert. In this, those things of their own accord are separated out, in which Schubert did not follow only his natural impulse to the popular song. He was in the first place no master or teacher of musical construction. His scores are simple, and even in his four-handed duets (he has left behind him duets of surpassing beauty) whole passages could often be rendered as they stand by a single player. Schubert never appears a slave to the arrangement he adopts; but the movement flows so naturally from his pen that there is no want of harmony between his idea and its realisation. He is just as little a special artist of the form. He has written many sonatas--four-handed and two-handed; but he cares little for the form. Where he can subject his dainty ideas to this mould, as in the first three movements of the duet in B flat major, he is interesting to us. When he cannot easily do so, he has recourse to variations in the style of the time or to all kinds of academic free fantasias. In this case he speedily becomes antiquated. But we must again remember that he has left us only youthful works. His latest sonatas, particularly those in A major and in B flat major; his latest chamber-music and symphonies, the wonderful Schumann-like F minor fantasia, and the Beethoven-like duet “Lebensstürme” in rondo form, are more weighty in structure and show him on the way to throw his great conceptions into more recognised forms: in this style he would have grown into a great artist.