The Études crown the efforts of this period, to bring technique and tune into the friendly relation peculiar to them. While we admire their mechanical value in point of polyrhythmical effects, wide stretches, double trills, independence of the left hand, airy piano-effects, freedom of the wrist, and quickness of finger-change, we praise their poetry, the grace of the C major or the magic of the A flat major, the solemnity of the C sharp minor, or the intoxication of the G flat major, the Titanic force of the C minor, or the melancholy of the E flat minor. The Nocturnes--with the silken web of the D flat major in their midst--are the high songs of melody which Chopin nowhere else has framed with such entrancing aspiration or such broad exclamatory sighs. But the dances are the high songs of rhythm, to which never yet was so intellectual a homage paid. The Polonaises have the _galant_ and knightly features of the old Polish nobility; and Chopin’s head rears itself in them more proudly than one would have expected from his feminine nature. But the Mazurkas are bourgeois little joys, half bathed in sorrow, half crushing their pain in the jubilation of the rhythm--an unparalleled series of intellectual inspirations. In the Waltzes we have only a higher kind of Mazurkas, with less of the national spirit, like Poles in the Parisian drawing-room. The slow Waltz in A minor, not without reason, was dearest to Chopin’s own heart. Chopin’s playing was the rapture of his contemporaries. All agree that his individuality could only be made intelligible by himself. How long did Moscheles torment himself with the remarkable harmonic transitions which he found in Chopin’s compositions! But when he heard the master himself, all doubt vanished; what had seemed violent now became self-intelligible. Chopin’s playing was dainty and airy; his fingers seemed to glide sideways, as if all technique were a glissando; even the Forte was in him not an absolute but a relative forte--relative, that is, to the gentle voice of the rest; and it rises, the older he grew, so much the less by force than by a subtle play of touch. All execution has made way for a certain free extempore poesy; the _rubato_ softens the harshness of bar-accent. Liszt’s definition of the rubato is well known--“You see that tree; its leaves move to and fro in the wind and follow the gentlest motion of the air; but its trunk stands there, immovable in its form.” Chopin seems never to have carried the rubato so far that this trunk itself would have stirred. Once already had a player arisen who cultivated this graceful and airy kind of execution. Field, a Scot by birth, Clementi’s pupil, a pale and dreamy man, had anticipated the delicate breadth of Chopin’s touch; and the world had been enraptured with his melancholy renderings by means of apparently motionless hands. Alongside of not very important sonatas, concertos, and rondos, he had published a