In point of natural genius no composer, excepting possibly Mozart, excelled him. His rich and pure vein of melody is unmatched in all the history of music. We have already pointed out the strong influence of the great Viennese classics upon Schubert. In forming an estimate of his style we must recur to a comparison with them. We think immediately of Mozart when we consider the utter spontaneity, the inevitableness of Schubert’s melodies, his inexhaustible well of inspiration, the pure loveliness, the limpid clarity of his phrases. Yet in actual subject matter he is more closely connected to Beethoven--it is no detraction to say that in his earlier period he freely borrowed from him, for, in Mr. Hadow’s words, Schubert always ‘wears his rue with a difference.’ Again, in his procedure, in his harmonic progression and the rhythmic structure of his phrases, he harks back to Haydn; the abruptness of his modulations, the clear-cut directness of his articulation, the folk-flavor of some of his themes are closely akin to that master’s work. But out of all this material he developed an idiom as individual as any of his predecessors’. The essential quality which distinguishes that idiom is lyricism. Schubert is the lyricist _par excellence_. More than any of the Viennese masters was he imbued with the poetic quality of ideas. His musical phrases are poetic where Mozart’s are purely musical. They have the force of words, they seem even translations of words, they are the equivalents of one certain poetic sentiment and no other; they fit one particular mood only. In the famous words of Lizst, Schubert was _le musicien le plus poète qui fût jamais_ (the most poetic musician that ever lived). We may go further. Granting that Mozart, too, was a poetic musician, Schubert was a musical poet. What literary poet does he resemble? Hadow compares him to Keats; a German would select Heine. For Heine had all of that simplicity, that unalterable directness which we can never persuade ourselves was the result of intellectual calculation or of technical skill; he is so artless an artist that we feel his phrases came to him ready-made, a perfect gift from heaven, which suffered no criticism, no alteration or improvement.