It was with the sanction of a people that Sibelius came to his task. For centuries before his birth the race that bore him had lain prone upon its inclement coasts. But now a new vigor was germinating within it. Youth had overtaken it once more, and filled it with the desire of independence. Chained to the Russian Empire, it was reaching out toward all that could give it the strength to persist and endure, toward all that could give it knowledge of its proper soul. And so Sibelius, in the search for the expression of his own personality, so much at one with that of his fellows, was traveling in the common way. The word that he was seeking, the word that should bring fulfilment to his proper soul, was deeply needed by his fellows. Inarticulate thousands, unaware though they were of his existence, awaited his work, wanted the sustenance it could give. And, certainly, the sense of the needfulness of his work, the sense of the large value set upon his best and purest attainments by life itself, must have been with Sibelius always, must have supplied him with a powerful incentive and made enormously for his achievements. He must have felt all the surge of the race driving him. He must have had continually the marvelous stimulus of feeling about him, for all the night and the cold, the forms of comrades straining toward a single lofty goal, felt himself one of an army of marching men. This folk, far in its past, had imagined the figure of a hero-poet, Vainemunden, and placed in his hands an instrument "shaped out of very sorrow," and attributed magical power to his song. And Sibelius, bowed over his music-paper, must have felt the dream stir within him, must have felt incarnate within himself, however incompletely, that mysterious image, and so proceeded with his work everlastingly assured that all he actually accomplished woke from out of the heart of the people, and responded to its immemorial need.