sound as though from the human voice--this, we might almost say, marks the discovery of the pianoforte by the nineteenth century. And it is equally romanticism’s growing realization of itself. All the impromptus are of great beauty, and all are unmistakably of Schubert. They have the fault of improvisations in that they are too long, but if one is in a leisurely mood to receive them, they never become a bore. The _Moments musicals_ are still more typical of Schubert’s genius--some of them short, ending suddenly almost before the hearer is aware that they have begun, but leaving behind a definite, clear-cut impression like a cameo. They are the ancestors of all the genre pieces of later times. Each of them might have a fanciful name attached, and each has the directness of genius. Schubert’s sonatas are important only in their possession of the qualities of the Impromptus and _Moments musicals_. They are filled with beauties, but as sonatas--as representatives of classical organization and logic--they are negligible. Schubert cannot resist the charm of a lovely melody, and, when he finds one, the claims of form retire into the background. Certain individual movements are of high excellence, but played consecutively they are uneven. The ‘Fantasia’ in C minor (containing one of the themes from Schubert’s song, ‘The Wanderer,’) is a fine imaginative and technical work, but its freedom of form is of no historical importance, as Mozart wrote a long fantasia in C that was even more daring. The dances, likewise, have no significance in point of form, being written altogether after the usual manner of the day (they were, in fact, mostly pot boilers), but they contain at times such appealing beauty that they helped to dignify the dance as a type of concert piano music. The ability to create the highest beauty _in parvo_ is distinctive of the romantic movement, and Schubert’s dances and marches have stimulated many another composer to simplicity of expression. The influence of them is evident in the _Carnaval_ and the _Davidsbündler Tänze_ of Schumann. Liszt elaborated them and strung several together for concert use, and the waltzes of Brahms, who, more perhaps than any other, admired Schubert and profited by him, are derived directly from those of Schubert.