The purest examples of the application of this scheme to orchestral music are to be found in the first movements of the symphonies of Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), of W. A. Mozart (1756-1791), and above all of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1821), the genius in whom the classical symphony culminated. The method adopted in such movements, of which the opening allegro of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony may stand as an unsurpassable model, was, first, to present two strongly individual and contrasting musical ideas ('themes’), the first usually more vigorous in character, the second more tender and appealing; second, to let these thoughts germinate or develop in such a way as to bring clearly forth what was at first latent in them; and, finally, to draw together the threads and complete the musical action by a restatement of the root ideas in something like their original form. The variety, the power, the subtlety, the unfailing instinct for beauty, with which Beethoven worked out the almost limitless possibilities of such a scheme can hardly be realized even dimly save by a loving study of his masterpieces, phrase by phrase, almost note by note. His symphonies are like Greek statues of the great period in their infinite variety, their perfect unity. It may seriously be doubted whether music can ever a second time attain the harmony of all its elements that it found in this supreme master--that which one of his critics has happily termed 'the perfect balance of expression and design.’ Certain it is that immediately after him, in large measure as a result of his own example, it took a pronounced turn toward picturesqueness, toward highly personal expression, toward all that is conveniently summed up in the vague word Romanticism. Just what romanticism means it is easier to suggest by examples than to define in general terms. Franz Schubert (1797-1828), emphasizing the lyric element in orchestral music, so that his symphonies have almost the personal expressiveness of songs, is romantic. Robert Schumann (1810-1856), with his vivid short piano pieces bearing such suggestive titles as 'Soaring,’ 'Whims,’ 'In the Night,’ 'Why,’ and with his musical portraits of friends, his quotations from his own works, and other ingenious devices for stimulating our imaginations, literary and pictorial as well as musical, is romantic. Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) is romantic with his orchestral canvases of the Hebrides islands bathed in sunshine and clamored over by sea-birds, and of the delicate dances of Shakespeare’s fairies in the 'Mid-summer Night’s Dream’; and romantic is Frédéric Chopin (1809-1849), with his nocturnes and preludes. The composers of the romantic period, in fact, embodied in the types of design they inherited from Beethoven (but practised, as a rule, with far less mastery than he) a sort of poetic suggestion of all kinds of things outside of music. Their art is essentially an art of suggestion; and,