The Kreisleriana are dedicated to Chopin; the Fantasia Op. 17 to Liszt. We are on the height on which the first artists of the piano are greeting each other; on which breathes the purest atmosphere of this intimate music; we are on the heights of a culture which has become the dominating power of the world. The Fantasia is, so to speak, a confession of this devotion. In its first movement there is an undefinable romantic feeling as of the words woven round a legendary theme (he called it first the “Ruin”), with mysterious passages, answering voice-parts, mystic ghostly calls. In the second there is the grand triumph, a panegyric on technique and toil--he called it the “Gate of Victory.” In the third is the poetic transfiguration (at first called “Star-picture”), with its ethereal dances and the dying sound of harps, and the sweeping mist, broken chords with pedal, resolved in rubato, over which descend the mournful melodies.[130] The first movement is not free from the variation-technique of the time; the second is a tribute to virtuosity; the third, a half Schubert. Contrasted with the Kreisleriana of 1838 we recognise an earlier style of 1836, and we wonder at the strong power of progressive development in Schumann--a power, which, strange to say, some would deny to him. But the Fantasia was so happily _felt_ that it despised time and still to-day stands in the forefront. As there are Études which seem to hold out a hand to Romance, so here Romance held out a hand to technique; and the Fantasia, in its three forms, remained a classic monument of all the contemporary tendencies. When Schumann published it he cut out the old inscriptions, its profits being devoted to assisting in erecting the Beethoven monument at Bonn, and wrote above the first movement this motto from Schlegel: “Through every tone there passes, to him who deigns to list, in varied earthly dreaming, a tone of gentleness.”