With one of his earliest songs--‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel’--composed when he was seventeen, Schubert establishes the principle of detailed delineation in the accompaniment, developed so richly in the succeeding decades. The whole of the melody is bound together by the whirring of the wheel in the accompaniment. But when Gretchen comes to her exclamation, ‘And ah, his kiss!’ she stops spinning for a moment and the harmonies in the piano become intense and colorful. This principle of delineative detail, even more than the _durchkomponierte_ form, constitutes the difference between the ‘art’ song and its prototype, the folk-song. The details become more and more frequent in Schubert’s songs as his artistic development continues. They are rarely realistic, as in Liszt, but they always catch the mood or the emotional nuance with eloquent suggestiveness. A free song, like _Die Allmacht_, follows the varying moods of the text line for line. But Schubert did not follow his text word for word as later song-writers did. He felt what the folk-singer feels, the formal musical unity of his song as apart from the unity in the meaning of the words. He was never willing to admit a delineative detail that involved a harsh break in the flow of beautiful melody. It was his choice of melody, much more than his choice of delineative detail, that gave eloquence to his songs. This melody is of great beauty and fluency from the beginning. The lovely songs of the spectral tempter in ‘The Erlking’ could not be more beautiful. Yet this gift of lovely melody becomes richer, deeper, and even more spontaneous as Schubert grew older--richer and more spontaneous than has been known in any other composer before or since. It is nearly always based on the regular and measured melody of folk-song, and rarely becomes anything approaching the free ‘endless melody’ of Wagner. But beyond such a generalization as this it can scarcely be covered with a single descriptive phrase. It was adequate to every sort of emotional expression, and was so gently flexible in form that it could fit any sort of poem without losing its graceful contour.