Philipp Emanuel Bach thus saw that the _Lied_ should do what the folk-song and the formal aria could not do. It is a nice question, whether the conscious _durchkomponiertes Lied_ is more truly expressive than the strophic folk-song. Mr. Henderson, in his book ‘Songs and Song Writers’[88] illustrates the problem by comparing Silcher’s well-known version of Heine’s _Die Lorelei_ with Liszt’s. Silcher’s eight-line tune has become a true folk-song. It keeps an unvarying form and tune through three double stanzas, using, to express the lively action of the end, the same music that expresses the natural beauty of the beginning. Liszt, on the other hand, with masterful imaginative precision, follows each detail of the picture and action in his music. Mr. Henderson concludes that he would not give Liszt’s setting for a dozen of Silcher’s. Some of us, however, would willingly give the whole body of Liszt’s music for a dozen folk tunes like Silcher’s. It is, of course, a matter of individual preference. But we should give an understanding heart to the method of the folk-song, which offers to the poem a formal frame of great beauty, binding the whole together in one mood, while it allows the subsidiary details to play freely, and perhaps the more effectually, by contrast with the dominant tone. Whatever may be one’s final decision in the matter, a study and comparison of the two settings will make evident the typical qualities of the folk-song and ‘art’ song as nothing else could. Emanuel Bach also showed his feeling for the lyrical quality of the _Lied_ by apologizing, between the lines, for his poems, saying that, although the didactic is not the sort of poetry best suited to musical treatment, Gellert’s fine verses justified the procedure in his case. There is in the melodies, as we have said, something of the feeling of the folk-song and of the Lutheran chorale. And there is also in them an indefinable quality which in a curious way looks forward to the free melodic expression of Schubert.