The particular merit of this accomplishment of Schubert will have more detailed discussion in the following chapter. But, aside from that, he touched no form that he did not enrich. By his sense of beauty, unaided by scholarship or the inspiration of great deeds in the outer world, he made himself one of the great pioneers of modern music. Together with Weber, he set the spirit for modern piano music and invented some of its most typical forms. His _Moments Musicals_, impromptus, and pieces in dance forms gave the impulse to an entire literature--the _Phantasiestücke_ of Schumann, the songs without words of Mendelssohn are typical examples. His quartets and his two great symphonies (the C major and the unfinished B minor) have a beauty hardly surpassed in instrumental music, and are inferior to the greatest works of their kind only in grasp of form. His influence on posterity is immeasurable. Not only in the crisp rhythms and harmonic sonorities of Schumann, in the sensuous melodies and gracious turns of Mendelssohn, but in their progeny, from Brahms to Grieg, there flows the musical essence of Schubert. Who can listen to the slow movement of the mighty Brahms C minor symphony without realizing the depth of that well of inspiration, the universality of the idiom created by the last of the Vienna masters? Schubert’s music was indeed the swan-song of the Viennese period of the history of music, and it is remarkable that a voice from that city, more than any other in Europe bound to the old régime, should have sung of the future of music. But so Schubert sang from a city of the past. Meanwhile new voices were raised from other lands, strong with the promise of the time. III The great significance of Weber in musical history is that he may fairly be called the first German national composer. Preceding composers of the race had been German in the sense that they were of German blood and their works were paid for by Germans, and also in that their music usually had certain characteristics of the German nature. But they were not consciously national in the aggressive sense. Weber’s works are the first musical expression of a German patriotism, cultivating what is most deeply and typically German, singing German unity of feeling and presenting something like a solid front against foreign feelings and art. But we are too apt to wave away such a statement as a mere phrase. At a distance we are too liable to suppose that a great art can come into being in response to a mere sentimental idea. But German patriotism was a passion which was fought for by the best brains and spirits of the time. It was in the heat of conflict that Weber’s music acquired its deep meaning and its spiritual intensity.