A number of Schubert’s are grouped together in ‘cycles,’ a procedure practised by Beethoven in his _An die Ferne Geliebte_, and brought to perfection by Schumann. Schubert’s twenty-four songs, ‘The Fair Maid of the Mill,’ to words by Müller, tell the story of a love affair and its consequent tragedy, enacted near the mill, by the side of the brook, which ripples all through the series. The songs tell a consecutive story somewhat in the fashion of Tennyson’s ‘Maud,’ but the group has little of the inner unity of Schumann’s cycles. The ‘Winter Journey’ series, also to Müller’s text, is more closely bound together by its mood of old-aged despair. The last fourteen songs which the composer wrote were published after his death as ‘Swan Songs,’ and the name has justly remained, for they seem one and all to be written under the oppressive fear of death. They include the six songs composed to the words of Heine, whose early book of poems the composer had just picked up. What a pity, if Schubert could not have lived longer, that Heine did not live earlier! Each of, these Heine songs is a masterpiece. Schubert’s literary sense may not have been highly critical, but it managed to include the greatest poets and the best poems that were to be had. His settings include seventy-two to words by Goethe, fifty-four of Schiller, forty-four of Müller, forty-eight of his friend Mayrhofer, nineteen of Schlegel, nineteen of Klopstock, nineteen of Körner, ten of Walter Scott, seven of Ossian, three of Shakespeare, and the immortal six of Heine. And, though he was not inspired in any very direct proportion to the literary worth of his poems, he responded truly to the lyrical element wherever he found it. Writing at about the same time with Schubert were the opera composers Ludwig Spohr, Heinrich Marschner, and Weber. The song output of these men has not proved historically important, but they have to their credit the fact that they were true to the German faith. Marschner’s songs are not altogether dead to-day, and Weber’s are in a few instances excellent. They come nearer than those of any other composer to the true style and spirit of the folk-song, and reveal from another angle the presiding genius of Weber’s operas.